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

[Chris Cannam]

On Wednesday 07 Jul 2004 20:14, tim hall wrote:
> Qsynth has a slightly odd way of loading soundfonts to my mind, causing the
> lowest entries in the list to overwrite the first few GM slots, it's not
> the ideal behaviour.

That's FluidSynth rather than QSynth -- when you load multiple soundfonts it 
just overlays them.  I remember moaning many moons ago on the fluidsynth list 
about a need for a way to tell it to load them to different banks or 
something, but I never implemented it and I don't think anyone else did.

> Perhaps I would feel more comfortable if I learned to use smurf
> wrote/threw together my own selection, but so far I haven't been able to
> get that application to produce any sound

Have you tried Swami, which is the newer edition of Smurf?

> the palette I'm looking
> for is quite limited, basically a decent fake orchestra that will run
> comfortably in 192M RAM

Probably one of those Creative 8MB soundfont thingies from the AWE driver set 
would be OK.  They're widely available, though I don't think they're actually 
legally redistributable.  Any better than that for an orchestral set in 192MB 
may be a losing proposition -- strings and brass are incredibly hard to do.

If you'd like a small, fascinating set of soundfonts that don't have much to 
do with real life, go to www.hammersound.net and download some of Bree 
Gorton's creations.  (They're all called Gort's something, and are generally 
in the Collections pages on that site.)  They're a bit long on boings and 
twangs, but there are some very fine impressions of strangely mistreated 
instruments as well.  I've occasionally wondered whether a bit of polite 
enquiry wouldn't be able to get some of these GPL'd or similar, as they're 
clearly original works that are already being given away free.


Chris