[linux-audio-user] Questions about qsynth, swami and soundfonts

Bill Allen lau at ballen.fastmail.fm
Sat Apr 15 11:28:59 EDT 2006


Having located a collection of soundfonts that I like, I'm interested in 
performing. I like the graphical interface to qsynth for loading and 
using soundfonts, but there are a couple of limitations for live 
performance it seems. Maybe these things are ignorance on my part and if 
so I hope that somebody can put an end to that state.

First, in order to change the current soundfont, you've got to select 
Channels, then right click on the channel you want to change and hunt 
for the soundfont you want in that channel. This is partially mitigated 
by having presets, but what that implies to me is that I'd have to have 
a preset for every soundfont program that I ever want to use. What I'd 
really like is a simple list of all the programs and be able to select 
the one I want with one click. How do others deal with this?

Second, it seems that soundfonts can hide other soundfonts. In other 
words, the order in which you place the soundfonts in setup/soundfonts 
matters. If you've got a soundfont that claims the same program number 
that comes after another soundfont in the list, that program hides the 
other one. Even in the best of worlds this would be a problem - the best 
of worlds defined as one in which the soundfont authors actually used 
the suggested midi program numbers for standard instruments (i.e. 64 for 
Soprano Sax, etc). It is a problem since many soundfonts have the same 
instrument with different tones (Hard Tenor Sax, Soft Tenor Sax) which 
would both want to use the same number, but can't within the same 
soundfont. In the world that we live in however, soundfont authors often 
ignore the midi program numbers and just number their programs from 1 
all to commonly, which exacerbates the hiding problem. Now, the hiding 
seems gratuitous since qsynth assigns each soundfound an SFID 
(presumably soundfont ID) which means that if the key was SFID/program 
number then it wouldn't matter that two soundfonts used the same range 
of numbers, but for some reason in qsynth this does seem to matter. I 
don't believe this is a generic issue since the same collection of 
soundfonts in freewheeling allows one to browse through each soundfont 
and select any program in that soundfont.

Having encountered this problem, I decided to take matters into my own 
hands and renumber the conflicting soundfonts so there was no conflict. 
Having produced my own soundfont for Soprano Sax (recently corrected for 
some notes tuning available at http://juraview.com/SopranoSax.sf2) using 
swami, I didn't feel any hesitation about loading the fonts and 
renumbering the programs. Unfortunately I can't find any way to renumber 
the programs in swami which is weird since I distinctly remember having 
done this with my soprano sax font, but this was well over a year ago. 
Has this capability been removed from swami or am I just missing it?

Any suggestions (other than FOAD) will be appreciated.

Bill



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