[LAU] Hammersound: no soundfonts ?

[Dan Muresan]

> Where to get decent soundfonts free ?

I've struggled with this before. Besides the alternatives already
mentioned have a look at

http://soundfonts.homemusician.net/

http://www.personalcopy.com/sfarkfonts1.htm

Therea are a few others I don't remember that Google turns up.

The general soundfonts that I found worthwhile were: Fluid (R3),
Chorium, Chaos Bank, Music Theory, Unison, RealFont, Merlin (v2.2),
Magic (v2). You have to search around, and it's hard to know whether you
really found the latest version of the sf.

Another option: if you search for famous instrument brands (e.g. Ibanez
soundfont, Stratocaster) you will find some really HUGE soundfonts from
fans.

I faced the following major problems:

1) sf2's are hard to use. Qsynth needs to start a separate engine for
every sf2, and Rosegarden for example sees those as different MIDI
devices. A complicated setup that's hard to reproduce after a year
passes by.

2) software support is poor. Well, on Linux it's almost non-existent.
There is the abandoned branch of Swami (the new version doesn't do sf2).
There are also some Windows freeware's that run (with problems, crashes
etc) under Wine. Merging two soundfonts or creating a custom soundfont
is doable but not fun.

Despite these shortcomings, I found sf2 and qsynth the only decent
alternative. Timidity worked very poorly for me. Fluidsynth doesn't
support GUS .pat files, so I couldn't use the freepat project.

Any better alternatives, programs, sound formats?


-- Dan