[linux-audio-user] how good are soundfonts and where do I find them?

[Atte André Jensen]

Hi

Being new to soundfonts I baically needed a decent piano soundfont for
arranging stuff for my students, but after shopping around, I thought it
maybe could be taken a step further. So my question is: Are soundfonts
good enough for "real" music production? And where can I find nice ones
to download? I guess I'm looking for imitations of real instruments,
mostly piano, accoustic drums and bass, but expressive strings and other
orchestral sounds would also be nice.

So far I found the "FluidR3 GM.SF2" (142M), how does that compare to
what's outthere? I also found alot of .sfArk sounds but it seems they
are in som kind of windows-only compressed format. I downloaded the
sfarkxtc_lx86.tar.gz but it complains "This file was created with sfArk
V1, and this program only handles sfArk V2+ files.  Use sfArk instead."
on all the .sfArk-files I downloaded. Is there a linux utility that will
uncompress those files?

I run debian/unstable and plan on using fluidsynth and rosegarden if it
matters...

-- 
peace, love & harmony
Atte

http://www.atte.dk