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#64031 03/07/10 09:57 AM
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If I use the Roland VSC dxi in BIAB it works fine but if I switch to Synthfont VST I can get stuttering and slowdown til it freezes the system. This seems to happen more and more lately . I have the latest version and the stand alone synthfont program work very well.
Have others had the same problems. There are several soundbanks I like to use with synthfont. Is there another vst that works better with BIAB for other sound font banks?
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The 'fonts are very likely loading into RAM. You should have at least 1gig available, more is better.

There is also a known problem with certain softsynths, like the Forte, where revisiting the synth's Control Panel causes it to reload everything in it every time, not clearing the ones that were already in the RAM from the first time. Needless to say, that can chew up the resources available pretty quickly.

As far as other available soundfont players that are either VST or DXi, there are lots of offerings of various price from free to whatever price around the web these days, here's what a Bing search just returned:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=soundfont+VST+player+plugin&src=IE-SearchBox

By far I have found that outside of the old Creative Live! series cards, which loaded soundfonts via their own processor, software soundfont playing can be a catch-as-catch-can situation, with some working for certain people's setups, the same ones not working as well for others, likely due to differentiations in systems, setup, resources, etc.

Matter of fact I've moved almost entirely to hardware MIDI synths again here and have avoided a lot of those frustrating, "it worked fine yesterday..." moments.


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I agree, it catch as catch can. Looking at the CPU load it was easy to see that the system overloaded quite quickly. I have several sound banks that sound well enough to workout the basics for a backing track then finish it out at home with better instrument. Synthfont had been working well until the last 2 updates. I've got a gig of ram on and old single core and maybe I need to just stay with VSC and not get too far out.
I've tried the demo of SFZ+ and works well but the demo drops out the vol about every 3rd bar but at least I can get a feel of it's value.
Too bad VSC can't use other sound banks, at least I can't find a way to load them.
Thanks Mac BTW the youtube vids of the "You Rock Guitar" looks like the best midi in to sequencers out there yet. Wyndham

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Quote:


Thanks Mac BTW the youtube vids of the "You Rock Guitar" looks like the best midi in to sequencers out there yet. Wyndham




Well, let's just say that it would be the least expensive. When and if I get my hands on one we shall see how good it is for the purpose. But I doubt seriously that it could compete with the Yammy 1000 setups out there, but to be fair, that's a serious cash outlay(grin).

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Wyndham,

I don't know how 'slow' you old core is but I had a 2004 2.5 ghz Celeron running XP that I used VST Synthfont with no problem. A few suggestons...

- Make certain Windows has enough virtual memory (pagefile). A large font bank will gobble up memory very quickly. Some people say to disable the pagefile but a small memory system needs it.

- Check to see if anything else is running at the time of the problem. Scheduled scans such as virus, defrag, spyware, etc will compete for CPU cycles and can cause the problems you described.

- There are (free) soundfont editing tools to extract certain sounds from a soundfont library. If you're using one of those 250+mb libraries but only use a few sounds, there is no reason to load the entire library. Synthfont can load individual soundfont files. Check this link if interested
http://download.cnet.com/SF2-Splitter/3000-2383_4-10498379.html

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I tried synthfont in the past and found it to be a really bogus program. SFZ is wonderful.


John
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SFZ, I think can only handle one instrument at a time. How can you use it in BIAB effectively when you want to use several different instruments from a sound bank? Would you switch to RB and assign instruments in SFZ to each track. Not a problem to do this, just wondering. Wyndham

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Bogus?

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Cakewalk has release the SFZ+ for free which allows for 16 tracks at once and has a DXi version to boot. The link is SFZ+ product page

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