Finale Notepad installs the SF2 file in its own folder, not in the standard place. Then Finale Notepad is using some kind of soundfont player under the covers the same way BIAB does with quicktime player, except they are hard coding their program to load their SF2 from some other custom location.

So no, installing Finale Notepad will not effect performance of BIAB at all, as is, BIAB would continue to use the 2MB dls file from Apple. If you want to use Finale's SF2 file with BIAB you would have to go copy it to some other places.

Method 1:

Copy the SF2 file to

Code:
  ~/Library/Audio/Sounds/Banks/


That still would not work directly with BIAB. but if you open the Quicktime DLS player as an AU plugin in your DAW, then you would see that bank available on the pull down list, and could choose it, then route midi from BIAB to the DAW and play it that way.


Method 2:

First convert the SF2 to DLS format. Then overwrite the gs_instruments.dls file with this one. At that point, yes it would take longer to startup BIAB because it would be loading a 41MB dls file when starting the program and it would be used for playback.

Future Method:

If BIAB were modified to allow us to select other SF2 banks, just like the DAW's do, then you could have it load the small 2MB from apple when starting up BIAB, but we could opt to load a different bank, IN STREAMING MODE and choose whichever sf2 file we want that is currently located in the path mentioned above.

The in streaming mode part should avoid long load delays I think.

Last edited by Dewdman42; 03/07/13 12:21 PM.