PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Seeking guidance with orchestral sample software

The .sf and .sf2 refer to SoundFont files, developed by Creative Labs. .sf2 is the second version of the format. They're basically a format for holding sampled instruments. They contain sampled sounds, and instruments composed of those samples. The instruments can specifies how samples are mapped to keys - samples can be assigned to ranges of keys, and also be triggered by velocity. There is additional information for the instrument as well - panning, low frequency oscillators, and so on.

One SoundFont file can contain one or more instruments, which can be made up of one or more samples.

An .sfz is similar in function, but consists of a set of files. The instrument file is a plain text file consisting of a description of what samples are mapped to the instrument's keyboard.

Where .sfz primarily differs from .sf is that the samples are not embedded in the instrument's description, stand-alone files. So if an .sfz instrument has 12 samples associated with it, you'll also have 12 separate .wav or .ogg file as well.

The SoundFont file format was pretty popular for a while, since Creative Labs used it to as the primary format for their SoundBlaster cards.

There are a number of free players available for each format. How well they implement the formats. I use the free sfz player to play SoundFonts from my DAW (Reaper). I had trouble running it with multiple instances - it would start crackling and dropping voices. I'm now running the multi-core build version, which runs fine. By default, it runs in "low quality" mode, so be sure to set Quality setting higher.

The violin demo was put together by initially auto-generating the melody in BiaB, and then importing the MIDI track into my DAW. It's got a "piano roll" display, which is something that I initially abhorred, but for editing MIDI data turns out to be more convenient than standard notation. I added the all the runs, slides, and adjustments there. I had loaded a bunch of different articulations on different MIDI channels, and changed the articulations as I felt appropriate. For example, the short runs alternated between the legato patch on channel 1 and the staccato patch on channel 2. I'd put in a bunch of slides via the mod wheel, adding the curves in manually. I replaced a number of those when I found one of the violin samples had a nice slur.

In total, I probably futzed around with that part for over 12 hours. But it was all done via mouse - no MIDI keyboard was used at any point.

If I've got a single melody line to enter, I'll use BiaB. If I've got something more complicated, I'll use Noteflight. The "free" version of Noteflight only allows a limited number of scores, but it works fine for me. Once I've mocked it up in Noteflight, I'll export it and load it into my DAW.

If I'm particularly lazy, I'll export it as MusicXML and import it into Finale's free NotePad notation program, and export the results as a MIDI file with Enable Human Playback set. It does a nice job interpreting the dynamics - especially things like trills, which can be tedious to enter by hand.

Here's a quick video review of GPO4.

I'm not sure what you consider "user friendly", so I'm not sure how to answer that question.

I've had to deal with MakeMusic (which purchased Garritan) the other week. There was an updated, but when I logged on to the site, I couldn't find it under the "updates" list. When I tried to contact tech support, it required that I enter the product I had... but Garritan wasn't on the list. They got back to me within a day explaining where the file was (by then I'd found it) and promised to fix the issues with their site.

I've not dealt with IK for support.

The only issue with using GPO4 in RealBand is that GPO uses the mod wheel to control volume. RealBand and BiaB treat the mod wheel as a LFO modulator, and by default set the controller to 0, which silences the instrument. To get around it, you need to insert a mod wheel event at the start of the track to turn the mod wheel back up.

I just loaded a Philharmonik flute as a melody instrument, and it works just fine.

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