Re: [LAU] Hammersound: no soundfonts ?

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