make fluidsynth audio driver 'jack' autoconnect to system playback device?

[FransKlip]

On my Ubuntu Studio 21.10 system, the mingus synth cannot be heard by default because the default fluidsynth driver 'jack' does not connect automatically to the system audio output.

One way to do is to use the fluidsynth setting audio.jack.autoconnect=1 before the synth output driver is started, the other is to specify an output device name.

Is there a way to set one of these from an application using mingus? Preferably the autoconnect.

In the code I can see that in the fluidsynth.init() function only 3 parameters (soundfont, audio driver and audio output file) are passed from in fluidsynth.start() to pyfluidsynth module and FluidsynthSequencer to start_audio_output(). The function to add an integer setting is already available in the pyfluidsynth interface: fluid_settings_setint(self.settings, 'audio.jack.autoconnect', 1)
Perhaps some way to specify one or more fluidsynth settings would be nice (e.g. setting to use several cores).

Thanks,
Frans

[FransKlip]

Work-around: specify 'alsa' as audio driver in the synth start call: fs.start(driver="alsa")
This connect to the default alsa audio output device immediately.
This is fine as long as you just want to hear the synth output and don't want to do any jack-type of audio post-processing on it.