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SoundFonts
The introduction of Sound Fonts to the world of midi was a major breakthrough for midi composers: Instead of being dependant on your soundcard's integrated sound samples, you now can load entire libraries of sounds into system memory and use them for midi playback. This doesn't only mean a leap forward in realism (imagine replacing your old 2 MB midi-soundcard with a 50MB midi-soundfont...), it also provides a huge amount of flexibility, allowing to exchange and modify entire libraries for special purposes. All you need is a Sound Font compatible soundcard and enough system memory...
But however fascinating these possibilities are - you won't get very far without knowing *how* to do it (and your soundcard documentation won't be of much help...). Beginners are often left standing in the rain, wondering what font they should use, why the hell they cannot load that bank, or why they suddenly have complete instruments disappearing from playback.
This article tries to provide some help for the most common problems and questions regarding Sound Fonts. Good luck!
| Where to get free SoundFonts |
I know of two major sites that provide almost everything you'll need:
The Sound Site has probably the biggest archive of SoundFonts - unfortunately without comments or reviews. Since the number of connections to the dowload-server is limited, you'll often be denied access to the files. However - here you'll probably find any important SoundFont, including entire midi banks of any size as well as special instrument patches.
HammerSound provides excellent resources including lots of articles, links and SoundFont archives. Instrument banks are described, user-reviews and -ratings are available.
SoundFonts are usually compressed in order to keep the downloads as small as possible. For achieving this, ordinary compression tools are used as well as special programs for SoundFont compression. Sooner or later, you'll probably end up with a file that you cannot decompress without dowloading additional software - so it might be a good idea to get at least the four most common tools:
SFArk,
SFPack,
WinRar and
WinZip.
The choice of a SoundFont bank usually depends on three things:
- System memory
- Kind of music you want to create or listen to
- Personal taste
In most cases, the bigger the bank, the higher the quality - but high demands on realism will quickly eat up your system-resources.
It's also important to know that there's nothing like a perfect SoundFont bank (at least none that I know of...). Each bank has it's own strenghts and flaws and often the strenghts of a bank lie in a particular genre of music. So the bank of your choice might be a different one for techno than for rock or orchestral pieces.
Needless to say, a bank with high overall quality will eat up much more memory than a specialized one - sooner or later you'll probably run into problems with size-limits...
Two important reasons for problems with big SoundFonts:
- Current Live-drivers don't allow using more than half of your memory for uploading samples
- Banks larger than 64MB or so are very likely to cause trouble on any system
However - there are cases when you'll want to exceed these limits...
| Memory limits & their solution |
The Live-drivers provided by Creative Labs only allow to use half of the total system-memory for uploading soundfonts. However, in certain cases it may be necessary to exceed this limit (for example for loading one of the really huge banks like 'Fluid').
There's a free program called MegaFont which allows you to adjust the cache size by hand.
It also enables dynamic caching (and it even helps to import patch names into Cakewalk !), allowing instruments to load and unload upon demand.
Without dynamic caching, a bank larger than 64MB or so will cause problems with voices suddenly dropping out and instruments disappearing (Live drivers seem unable to keep such huge banks in memory).
With MegaFont even banks like Fluid are reported to run without dropouts. I personally experienced some problems with combining big fonts into one bank, but the results still were better than without MegaFont.
| Entire banks | Piano fonts |
- Chaos Bank (8MB)
- Unison (29MB)
- Reality (32MB)
- Cadenza (50MB)
- Taji Generation SE99 (53MB)
- Xioad Bank (63MB)
- Fluid Release II (120MB)
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- Pianissimum (~7MB)
(Unfortunately has some background noice in the loop)
- Stereo Grand Piano(~7MB)
(Similar to Pianissimum, but loops are better)
- Piano Hubbe Velo Generic Grand (~25MB)
(*Great*, but will cause problems if used together with other big fonts)
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All these Banks are available for Download at the Sound Site and HammerSound.
My personal bank (60MB) is based on Vicman's modified version of Cadenza. The bank combines the best of several big banks (like Taji & Fluid) and has its special strenghts in orchestral music.
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Midi articles: Introduction
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