PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Recording, Mixing, Performance and Production How to Get Better Sound Quality from BIAB from Midi Styles

This is an excellent thread, and I've picked up quite a few tips here including experimenting with Kontakt and some of their free libraries and instruments, which I set up fairly easily yesterday, and does some nice things. At the risk of making this thread too sprawling, here are some tidbits on what I've tried to far that which has worked for me. Note that I'm working primarily in BIAB at this point, and not exporting into DAW's and all that fancy stuff (yet). I'll start with SoundFonts.

SoundFonts - These can produce pretty decent sounds and many are available for free but the technology is old and decent players are in limited supply.

#A few sources that I've used for SoundFonts which I've liked:

*Don Allen's Soundfonts (Timbres of Heaven)
http://midkar.com/soundfonts/index.html

*Essential Keys - Free SoundFonts - John Nebauer is the site owner
https://sites.google.com/site/soundfonts4u/
- The Yamaha C5 Salamander is pretty impressive

*Another source
http://soundfonts.darkesword.com/

*GoldMidiSF2 - Some free ones, payment required for some of the better/bigger packages.
https://www.goldmidisf2.com/megapro-studio-soundfonts/
- The mega packages and Pro versions sound pretty impressive but are not free
- Some decent packages of free SoundFonts
- They offer a very large collection of a few GB of SoundFonts which you can request but they require a donation for it
- Site is in Italian but my browser let me read it in English (YMMV)


#SoundFont Players

There seems to be a lack of decent VST-based SoundFont players, at least ones that are current and supported. The ones that I've found most useful and which work in BIAB 2020 (and I have only tried a few) are:

*Sforzando (Included with BIAB)
*VSTSynthFont64
*Phenome

In each case there are limitations and gotchas:

*Sforzando (Included with BIAB)
- Requires conversion to Aria format to use
- Aria conversion is very easy - just drag and drop your SF2 or SFZ
- Conversion has worked very well for the many soundfonts that I've tried, but managing multiple sets with large collections becomes quite tedious and complex.

*VSTSynthFont64
- Worked with most SoundFonts that I tried
- Interface is a bit bland and not easy to navigate
- Saving your customized SoundFont settings with BIAB projects is a bit cumbersome

*Phenome v1.7
- Requires JBridge since it is only available as a 32 bit VST
- Only works reliable (for me) if I use the option to split the GUI out using the JBridge advanced settings
- Has a fantastic feature set and numerous controls that are not present in the two above.
- Figuring out how to select a SoundFont, working with long names is tricky, and saving your settings such as the Reverb, attack, etc.) and with your project is tricky - still working that out.
- When it works, it can produce quite impressive results.

If you want more info about how I've set up and got some of these working in BIAB, I'll be glad to provide more info. Again, keep in mind that I'm on the novice end in BIAB, so if you're really serious about getting the most out of your setup, I would go with the tips and advice already provided on the more sophisticated setups. That will serve you better if you goal is to create high quality projects.