Dear Anyone.

Saw soundfonts being talked about on this forum so I'm hoping SOMEONE will be able to answer this dumbass noob question...

I have the Cakewalk (I think!) SFz+ Soundfont Player and a ton of Soundfonts. But there's something I don't understand about the SFz+ Player and I know I'm gonna kick myself when someone tells me...

It's got 16 channels, so you can have up to 16 soundfonts on the go at once, I've got that understood. BUT - and here's the bit I DON'T understand - it's only got 8 outs! As far as I can understand, in effect that means you can only use 8 soundfonts if you want to EQ (or whatever) them individually because otherwise you're doubling-up on the outs, no? So you start having to use effects on things in pairs, not individually, because you're out of outs, am I right in this?

What's the purpose - and there had to be one originally - of having twice as many channels as outs? Why isn't it 16 outs so you got one per channel?

Now I know, deep inside, that's one dumbass question. I just don't see this. Can anyone put me outta their misery by answering it?

Yours hopefully and Happy Christmas

Chris.

Chris,

I haven't used soundfonts in years. You've prompted me to go and have a look at them again. I have the sfz+ player (Cakewalk took it over from RGC if my memory is correct).

I'm caught up right now but I'll come back to this in 3 or 4 hours and write you a brief tutorial on how to get the soundfonts happening... if that will help.

To get 16 channels of sounds playing you'd need to use 16 different instances of sfz (at least as far as I understand it) - I'm not sure how sturdy the program is and whether it could cope with that.

Anyway.... back a little later...

Noel

Getting started...

1. Load the SFZ+ DXi or VST in your host program.

2. Once loaded, left click on the area show below.



2. Now navigate to the directory where you have sf2 files stored and select one. I'm going to select the "accordion" just as an example.



3. The accordion will now appear as a file in the window you clicked on to start.



4. Some sf2 files will have multiple instrumental choices, some will only have one. To access any choices that are available (if they exist), click on the arrowhead beside the word "Program".



5. A dropdown menu of choices will open. Select one from the list (if there is more than one).



6. Now set the midi channel that you want SFZ to play the midi on by clicking on the arrowhead beside "Channel". For example, if SFZ is loaded in the Piano slot in BIAB (immediately below the bass), SFZ will need to be set to midi channel 3 since BIAB sets the the Piano track to midi channel 3



Click ok and exit.

You should be able to get a sound now if you play the midi file.

Hopefully this will get you going so that you can experiment. As I said initially, to get 16 channels playing back, my understanding is that you'll need to have 16 lots of SFZ set up. I stand to be corrected on this.

All the best,
Noel

more information...

I've playing around with loading in multiple sf2 files and it does look as thought it's possible to load more than one sf2 in a single instance of SFZ. Since I only have 4GB of RAM in total though, I'm limited with what I can do on my computer.

My plan of attack would be to load independent soundfonts and then render them to an audio file.

Hope you have enough information to be able to experiment further.

Noel

Hi Noel,

I don't claim to understand SFZ and/or SF2 that well, although I do use a large, General MIDI compatible SF2 file for CoolSoft Virtual MIDI Synth (CVMS) to play all my MIDI songs. And it sounds pretty darn good!

It seems to me that you may need to create (by playing) or to "obtain" samples of the instruments you need in a particular song and then use a Soundfont Editor (apparently there are several free ones out there) to create your own song specific, SF2 file.

BIAB or RealBand could then use CVMS (for example) to play all MIDI sounds - if "Use VSTi/DXi Synth" is not selected in MIDI/Audio Drivers Setup.

It would then be sort of like using the old DLS (downloadable sounds) format to provide specific instrument samples for each MIDI song. I hope I've got some of this right, and if so - that it helps!

Cyan

I haven't worked with SF2s is a long time but I remembered that you can have more than one SF2 playing at the same time. I just had to figure out how again.



Thus here is what you do:
1-file> load either the SF2 sound or a bank of sounds-note that I loaded a GM band.

2-mode> be sure that this is set at SF32 otherwise you may get an out of memory message

3-channel> pick your MIDI channel between 1-16, when using with BiaB make sure this channel and the one in BiaB match. You can have up to 16 channels playing simultaneously.

4-bank> if you loaded a multi banked group of fonts you can pick which bank to choose your SF2 from but most all of the time this should be set at 0.

5-program> if you picked a SF2 bank you can pick which sound you want here - if you picked a single sound it will be automatically loaded here.

6-poly> pick the amount of polyphony you want. Note I did make a mistake on my selection as it should not be 32 but more like 4 or 5 but keeping it at 32 with a few sSF2s is ok. As you add more SF2s you may run out of polyphony.

Now you can either keep the SF2 as received or you can tweak the sound with the sliders. Note that there is a quality window in the master section. You can change the sound somewhat with that by setting it at a higher level-I did not do that in the picture.

So for most purposes, eight outs is plenty. The fact that it happens to be half of sixteen is probably only related to it being a power of two, as are most computer-based numbers.

If you're using the SFz+ player within a DAW, you'll generally put a different instance of the player on each track. Most DAWs give the option on splitting a MIDI file into multiple tracks.

It's a lot simpler than routing the MIDI track outs to other tracks to apply effects - it's easy to lose track of things. Plus, it's simpler to edit the MIDI data if it's split out.

I use the rcg:audio sfz player in my DAW, but you've got to set the MODE to DFD to load large sample sets.

I also rather like the sforzando player. The sfz format is a bit easier to understand than the sf (SoundFont) format. It's plain text, which is nice. I've ported a slew of instruments from different formats over to the sfz format, and use it to play my EWI on an old netbook.

Thanks, Mario and David. You given me a great education in soundfonts. Appreciate it.

Besides what David said about sforzando

and besides being free the program comes with standalone as well as both 32 and 64 bit VSTi flavors and RTAS, is powered by same ARIA engine as used by the Garritan ARIA player and will play all Garritan, Dim Pro, and Finale banks/sounds, can render MIDI files, and a lot more.

Larry

Soundfonts are like rotary telephones. Does anyone even use them anymore?

I used soundfonts for a time when I was searching for better sounds coming out of synths like TTS. Once I found sample players, I stopped using fonts. I look at fonts now as low quality samples. They very often are basic and while they sound better than a synth generated instrument, they pale in comparison to the nice 3rd party samplers on the market. I'm not knocking them as they were a very important part of my musical education with digital recorded music.

At the time, I used the smaller "free" SFZ player. It was a single channel player. I now have SFZ+ but seriously, I have never opened it. Not even to check it out. It was included with the DAW but along with several other things, I don't use them for how I work. I also found other that there were 2 different formats of SFZ files and not all of the files would work properly. Some didn't work at all. These issues caused me to start looking for a better way to do things.

To the point......You can load as many SFZ instances as the computer & software will support.

Regarding the output number vs the number of available channels.... rather than try to use one instance of SFZ to play 12 tracks, I would opt to have 2 instances with the 12 channels split among them. 8+4 or 6+6.... that way you have control of every track as needed.

my 2 cents

do you have a large collection of soundfonts which are superior sounds? from my experience years ago with soundfonts, they were typically better sounding than some of the GM softsynths like Roland Soundcanvas (or even Coyote, IMO), however there are better alternatives now such as SampleTank, Kontakt, many many others. even TTS-1 has better sounds than a lot of the soundfonts I used years ago.

You've gotten great advice above on how to get your soundfonts to work, but I would advise "breaking out of your soundfont shell" and see what else is available today! you will probably be pleasantly surprised!

Yep... got to agree with Beagle......

Time to move on from fonts. Let them be a step in the process. Now, check out the really nice samplers. Start with Kontakt or perhaps the entire Komplete Kollection from NI.

So many third party companies are making sample libraries for Kontakt, and it is a professional grade synth. It will give you the most open doors and bang for the buck and you won't be disappointed in it's sound quality.