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

[Mark Knecht]

Them wrote:
> tim hall wrote:
> 
>> Over half of the soundfonts I've downloaded either don't work, sound 
>> plain awful or consist of just one halfway decent sound, the palette 
>> I'm looking for is quite limited, basically a decent fake orchestra 
>> that will run comfortably in 192M RAM, with possibly some classic 
>> keyboards (hammond, farfisa, vox, rhodes, wurly, mellotron type 
>> stuff). i.e. the stuff that's hard to synthesise.
> 
> 
> If you find some decent Mellotron sounds, I'd be interested in hearing 
> about it.  I've got a VST plugin with samples from a real Mellotron, but 
> I've yet to get it working using libfst or vstserver.  I may just end up 
> making my own samples of the samples (which are, after all, early analog 
> samples of real instruments) and using them as soundfonts or something 
> along those lines.  Of course, I can't redistribute them, since the 
> samples from GMedia are copyrighted.
> 

If you're up for trying something new (I'm not a sound Font fan) you can 
get a free Mellotron gig file at

http:www.worrasplace.com

(Look under 'Oldies'.)

and run it under QSampler, the GUI for LinuxSampler.

http://www.rncbc.org/ls/

(Build everything on Rui's LS page if you're interested in trying any of 
this out.)

LS is all very much development software, and there are a lot of changes 
going on right now so it may be broken, but maybe you'll get lucky. LS 
is a Jack application and gerneally runs very well for me on most gig 
files. There are still a few it really dies on but I cannot get the 
developers to pay attention to those yet.

I use a different, for money, Mellotron gig file under QSampler and GSt, 
but this free one is certain OK when buried in the right mix.

Good luck!

- Mark