whats a sound font ?

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Aron
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon Jul 19, 2004 12:13 am

Post by Aron » Wed Jul 21, 2004 9:53 am

I use a sound blaster Live 5.1 digital soundcard and it says you can use sound fonts.

Whats that mean?

Dose it mean I can load different sound fonts in and have dif say drum sound e.t.c?

Thank : Aron


HDB
Posts: 46
Joined: Sat Feb 07, 2004 12:19 am

Post by HDB » Wed Jul 21, 2004 10:42 am

Aron,
That's what it is. They are basically samples of instruments/sounds that load into memory and trigger from a MIDI sequencer.
You can mix and create your own SF sets to use the sounds you want, instead of just relying on a General MIDI sound set. You could load a general set, and just replace instruments one at a time.
Google up "soundfonts", and you'll find loads of free ones. Some are pretty good, many are OK, and there's some really bad ones. They can be small or extremely large. A lot of time the larger ones sound better because of several reasons. On smaller ones, they may have been made taking a sample and skipping a few notes, but just manipulating the pitch of each sampled note to cover all the pitches. Larger may have taken more samples. (Maybe someone who did a piano actually sampled all 88 notes instead of just every 3rd or so).
Some may also be multisampled for varied velocities, attacks and so forth that you trigger with a velocity sensitive keyboard or controller data.
Some may have been been looped more elegantly.
Some may have just been recorded better.
You can edit them with several programs. I just use the one that came with the card, Vienna SF Editor.
You can create your own.
You have to determine what your soundcard and computer will handle, and how to load them into various situations and programs.
There are lots of sites out there that have soundfont info.
Fire up the Google. Read about them. Download a bunch. (I have several thousand. I have created a SF folder, then created folders in that for Drums, Bass, Piano, Organ, Effects, Entire Kits, Misc., etc.) Some words to Google might be "Soundfont", "Soundblaster", "SF2", "Audigy", ....anything that might have something to do with them. A lot of pages will have links.
You may even search for "Samples", because some pages will have things in different format like .wav, .aiff, sf2., etc. (You can convert some things, like .wav files, to SF).

HDB

Aron
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon Jul 19, 2004 12:13 am

Post by Aron » Thu Jul 22, 2004 11:10 pm

Very cool thanks for that info, Ill do what you say and give it a blast.

Thanks Aron from Auckland New Zealand

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