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

Hi 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. So far I found the "FluidR3 GM.SF2" (142M), how does that compare to what's outthere? 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? I run debian/unstable and plan on using fluidsynth and rosegarden if it matters... -- peace, love & harmony Atte http://www.atte.dk