PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Macintosh Apple DLS synth - changing banks

The Apple DLS synth is capable of loading other Soundfonts besides the default one from Apple. This is done by placing SF2 soundfont files into the following location:



Code:

---

 ~/Library/Audio/Sounds/Banks/ 

---

Once you have done that, then the DLS synth is able to use them. When I use the DSLsynth AU plugin that is provided by Apple, there is a pulldown box to select which Soundfont I want to use, and there they are.

In Digital Performer I am able to use the DLS synth this way.

Is it possible with BIAB to use these alternative soundfonts somehow? The reason is that its the easy way to render an audio file of the song directly in BIAB, but would prefer the improved soundfonts.

Interesting. I used core midi to play through Kontakt (piano sounds mostly), but never managed to render the sounds from within BIAB.
Drag&drop to garageband take care of that, but it would be cool to be able to do it in BIAB.
Any good HQ GM soundfonts out there?

Its hard to find really good quality GM/GS soundfont sets anymore, but they are around. Here are some I know about, some free, some not.

NAProGM.sf2 Included with Notability Demo.

Ntonyx freebie soundfont: http://www.ntonyx.com/sf_f.htm

Ntonyx commercial soundfonts: http://www.ntonyx.com/sf.htm

http://soundfonts.homemusician.net/collections_soundfonts/airfont_340.html

http://soundfonts.homemusician.net/collections_soundfonts/fluid_release_3.html

http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=fluid-soundfont-gm

http://www.schristiancollins.com/generaluser.php

Here is a related thread too:
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24876

I guess BIAB is trying to move to RealTracks, which are really outstanding, but many styles still require some midi sounds and they could drastically improve the sound quality by either making it possible for us to select which DLS soundbank to use, and/or them providing us with a nice SF2 also to load in there.

Here is a bit more information.

First check out this primer on the Quicktime DLS player:

http://testtone.com/developers/apple/dls-music-device/review

So the interesting thing is that on the Mac you can have many banks of sounds available to load into the Quicktime DLS player, but you can also configure it to stream from disk rather than loading the whole thing into memory first. When the quicktime DLS player is used from say, garageband, or just about any DAW will recognize it as one of the AU plugins and you will see these options to choose an SF2 soundfont bank and optionally to stream from disk.

Unfortunately BIAB does not provide that interface currently.

However there is still one more way to override the sounds and use them with BIAB. Quicktime can play both soundfont SF2 files and DLS files. The default soundbank used by quicktime is a rather small 2MB GM soundbank (no wonder it sounds cheap), its in DLS format and located here:

Code:

---

  /System/Library/Components/CoreAudio.component/Contents/Resources/gs_instruments.dls

---

You can convert Soundfont banks into DLS banks using a Windows program called Extreme Sample Converter. Unfortunately that program is not free. I do not know if there is another way to convert SF2->DLS maybe so. In any case, if you convert a GM SF2 bank into a DLS bank and move it into that location, then that will be loaded by default by any program that is using the quicktime DLS player, including BIAB. However, since you can't configure streaming, it may take a long time to load. I found that this worked with BIAB, but for a 60MB soundbank (which sounded a lot better by the way), it took a couple of minutes for BIAB to start up, presumably because it was trying to load this 60MB DLS file into memory somehow and it took a while. It did seem to play fine.

If PGMusic would consider improving their support for the DLS player, to choose banks and to select the streaming option, it would open a lot of possibilities. There are many SF2 GM and GS soundbanks out there, they are used a lot in the karaoke world.

The Finale Notepad program (free), also includes a GM soundfont bank that it uses with the DLS player. You can install that free program and move the soundfont later, the soundfont is called synthgms.sf2 and its about 41MB.

Great info Dewdman! Thanks

There are ways to access different QuickTime dls synth sound banks, assuming that BIAB is written in some variant of C+.
It would have to be written into BIAB. The function would look something like below, and I'm not sure how well it would work.
Although it's been many years since I've actually done any coding, I have used this in attempting to write some AU synths many years ago.
I am assuming this call has not been depreciated and still works.

Quote:

---

// On OS X there are known places were sample banks can be stored
// Library/Audio/Sounds/Banks - so you could scan this directory and give the user options
// about which sample bank to use...
if (argc > 1)
bankPath = const_cast<char*>(argv[1]);

require_noerr (result = CreateAUGraph (graph, synthUnit), home);

// if the user supplies a sound bank, we'll set that before we initialize and start playing
if (bankPath)
{
FSRef fsRef;
require_noerr (result = FSPathMakeRef ((const UInt8*)bankPath, &fsRef, 0), home);

printf ("Setting Sound Bank:%s\n", bankPath);

require_noerr (result = AudioUnitSetProperty (synthUnit,
kMusicDeviceProperty_SoundBankFSRef,
kAudioUnitScope_Global, 0,
&fsRef, sizeof(fsRef)), home);

}

---

Update: Here is the link I was searching for when I posted the code snippet above, this explains how to change banks with the DLS synth.
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2283/_index.html


Hopefully this helps.

- Jay

Hi Dewdman, When you get the Finale Notepad SF2, does it (or can it) replace the Apple DLS, or does it require higher bank patches to access it? Also, if you've added something like the Finale Notepad SF2, does a program like Band-in-a-Box take longer to bootup (because it is pre-loading whatever SF2 are in the folder)

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.

I'm not at all sure how to access the Quicktime synth programmatically, but I think you are probably 90% there already since you're using it in BIAB, its just a matter of providing a dialog to assign which sf2 file to use and a few options like streaming.

MANY MANY MANY GM sound font banks to be found here:

--> http://zandro.freeunixhost.com/

Wow and I just found this soundfont which is quite outstanding from the demos, and is FREE!:

http://www.schristiancollins.com/generaluser.php


And more:

http://www.synthfont.com/soundfonts.html


Check out this 2GB bank that is supposedly tested on thousands of midi files and could be the ultimate GM soundbank. I am still trying to figure out how to download it.

http://www.synthfont.com/punbb/viewtopic.php?id=167


Here's a commercial one that might actually be pretty good, but a bit pricey

http://www.sonivoxmi.com/ProductDetail.asp?Item=GMWavetable250Meg


Found another interesting FREE one here (see bottom of the page, get all 5 parts for "Titanic"):

http://rapidlibrary.com/source.php?file=ulzrtxexyri89on&sec=fa540557


Here's another large free one called Shan's GM soundfont:

http://www.geocities.jp/shansoundfont/


Here are some that might be donationware, not sure:

http://www.soundfonts.gonet.biz/

Sorry, a little bit off topic but...

Just curious Dewdman, have you tried re-naming your SouldFont (or DLS file) and put it in place of the default "gs_instruments.dls" file ?

I was wondering if that fixed the MIDI low volume problem that Apple has had since 10.6 ?

If you were not aware there was a bug introduced in 10.6 which cut the MIDI output volume drastically.
I am on 10.7 and the problem still exists, and I am told it is still not fixed in 10.8.
Google search for "OS X low MIDI volume" for more info.

Myself I went back to using my external SoundCanvas, since Apple hasn't fixed this yet, and I got tired of updating all my existing work for the new MIDI volume settings.

If anyone interested in helping to get this issue resolved, I would suggest filing a bug report with Apple.
I know I have reported this several times, with each OS update, maybe if enough people report it they will fix it.

https://bugreport.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/RadarWeb.woa/wa/signIn

Sorry about going OT, but I was hoping this may be a workaround for the low volume problem.

- Jay

Also just found this interesting utility that runs on OSX which can be used to edit SF2 and DLS soundbanks. Its not free. I have no idea how well it works, but it looks very interesting for compiling your own custom GM soundfont that could then play right from within BIAB.

http://sonicamigos.com/polyphontics/

Yea I see many posts all over the net. Sounds like this problem started with Lion (which I don't use, I'm staying with SL for a number of different reasons, this only adds to the list.

The work around most people mention is to use the AU version of the player. Under the covers I would think that its the same engine being used in either case, however I think this comes down to two different ways the player is being used programmatically. One way, the old way, references a quicktime player as a "midi device". This is undoubtedly what BIAB is using now also. A lot of software is. And apparently this API does not expose or document how to do certain things, like set the volume level for example. I'm willing to bet this API also does not provide a way to "stream" the soundfonts or to select alternative SF2 banks.

The other way to use the component is by using the DLSMusicDevice AU plugin which is provided by Apple and seems to use the same underlying engine, except through the AU interface. That means that software wishing to use it will have to force their software to deal with AU hosting instead of using a simple midi interface, which is undoubtedly quite a bit more involved. That is how we access it when using the DLSMusicDevice from within a DAW or GarageBand.

So this is sad news all the way around. First it means that in Lion the quicktime DLS player pretty much sucks. A lot of people are complaining all over the place and many software creators are upset about it too. I have heard different theories about what is causing it, but nobody really knows and the simple midi interface API does not expose all the controls necessary to override this built in behavior. Maybe someone can find some hidden pref file somewhere to configure it, but it seems like a lot of people already tried to sleuth this out and didn't find a solution.

but the other sad news is that as far as BIAB is concerned its not going to be possible, I don't think, to configure streaming or use other soundfont banks within BIAB unless they wrote a considerable amount of code to handle AU hosting to host the DLSMusicDevice instead of using the simple API that is used now.

I hope that makes sense.

Well anyway for me here its still possible to load in a better DLS file by replacing gs_instruments.dls, it just takes a while to start up BIAB. And its still possible to host DLSMusicDevice in another AU host or DAW of some kind. Fortunately for me I'm not on Lion or ML so I don't have the volume problem mentioned. I really don't know what to say about that...it sounds like Apple really screwed up a lot of people with that design change and hasn't shown any interest to correct it.

Are BIAB users on Lion and Mountain Lion having this problem with midi playback through DLS?

>>> I was wondering if that fixed the MIDI low volume problem that Apple has had since 10.6 ?
If anyone interested in helping to get this issue resolved,

I haven't noticed any problem. I just had a listen on Mountain Lion (10.8) and Snow Leopard (10.6.8).
If I understand the bug description correctly, the MIDI is supposed to be quieter on Mountain Lion, and this should affect all MIDI programs using the built-in Apple DLS synth.

But I just tested, and the MIDI volumes sound identical to me, both in absolute volume, and relative to the audio (RealDrums) in the song.

-I used a MIDI style (ZZJAZZ.sty), and had the drums replaced with RealDrums JazzBrushes#1
- so having a mix of RealDrums and MIDI would expose a bug, as we would hear the drums too loud on Mountain Lion.
But they sound the same to me.

Here are the audio renders:
Snow Leopard (10.6.8): http://nn.pgmusic.com/pgfiles/jazzu/misc/Snow_Leopard_ZZJAZZ.m4a

Mountain Lion (10.8.2): http://nn.pgmusic.com/pgfiles/jazzu/misc/MountainLion_ZZJAZZ.m4a

Here are the same two files in a ZIP http://nn.pgmusic.com/pgfiles/jazzu/misc/MountainLionAndSnowLeopard_BiabFiles.zip

These renders are of the demo song /Applications/Band-in-a-Box/Songs/ZZJAZZ.MG1
Volumes are flat at 90.
They have MIDI bass,piano, and trumpet melody. And RealDrums for audio.
If there is a bug, the Mountain Lion one should be sounding quieter, in relation to the drums.

Hey Peter,
I couldn't find the files in your Dropbox folder, but I do believe you.
It depends what version of SL you are running. The bug was introduced somewhere around 10.6.5 IIRC.
I forget the version numbers, but the final version of SL (10.6.8 I think) had the bug, so the volume would be the same as later versions.

If you were to do a comparison between Leopard and Snow Leopard you would hear the difference.

I do a lot of background music for a friend's video business, so I re-use a lot of old work as starting points, and then build on them.

The change in volume messed up a lot of my earlier work, and rather than change all my earlier stuff I just went back to my external sound module.

My thinking was when Apple fixed the bug, I would have to go back and change everything back again, so I never bothered.

- Jay

Thanks Jay,
Yes, I am using 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard), so maybe that's why it sounds the same as Mountain Lion. Anyway, the MIDI balance sounds good to me. Does the MIDI on Biab with the older versions sound "too loud" or about right - in comparison to audio?

MIDI is always quieter than audio (Windows or Mac). This is because MIDI synths need to be quiet, because they need to be prepared for a huge number of notes, and don't want to distort.

btw, I fixed the links above. The fixed ones don't seem to work right either, so I put them in a zip, which does work.