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

[Thomas Kerstgens]

On Wednesday 07 July 2004 10:10, Atte André Jensen wrote:
> 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.

You can find some nice sounds at
http://www.natural-studio.co.uk/sampled.htm
but you should read the copyright notice. The usage is not allowed in 
commercial productions.
IMHO soundfonts are a serious alternative for "real" music productions. If you 
don't use excessive filtering or modulation envelopes (and you won't like to 
do that if you want natural sounds), the soundquality (nearly?) just depends 
on the quality of the used samples. In general: I was usually satisfied with 
soundfonts.

[...]
> 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?

 There seems to be a general problem with sfArk V1 files and unix-like 
operating systems. Explaination:
http://www.melodymachine.com/sfark_linux.htm

Regards, Thomas