Someone please clarify something for me? On the following post on a different forum. Someone explains the reason that soundfonts don't sound great. I've downloaded a bunch of GM soundfonts to try and play midi files through vlc or some other player, and they don't sound good. When I read this post below, it seemed to make sense to me:

https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=559685

Quote:
Soundfonts will never sound convincing with GM / GS / XG MIDI-files, because those files rely on MIDI Control Change Messages – Continuous Controllers
e.g.
71 = Filter Resonance
74 = Filter Cutoff Frequency
73 = Attack time
84 = Portamento amount
91 = Reverb send
93 = Chorus send
95 = Phaser send
... and the list goes on and on.

This is not possible to program into Soundfonts.
You need a proper GM-Sound-Module from Yamaha or Roland or Korg with complete implementation of MIDI messages. (Hardware or now better software-pendants)
Otherwise the files will never sound right, just ok if you are lucky and the file does not rely too much on controllers.


Yet I keep seeing a lot of discussion about SynthFont. What exactly is SynthFont, is it a soundfont or a vst? Is what the poster in that forum said true about soundfonts?

I downloaded the 5mb YAMAHA S-YXG50 vst he references and played a midi file with foobar2000, and it did sound better than soundfonts that are hundreds of megabytes, or more even..