Hello everyone,
This might be a nice tip for those who want a good free alternative for BiaB's built in Coyote Synth.
You can download the Magic Soundfont (which gives a very full and natural sound) for free here:

ftp://ftp.personalcopy.net/pub/MagicSFver2.zip

You can load the soundfont with the following 2 programs.
Windows 8: Coolsoft virtual synth.
http://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/virtualmidisynth

Windows 7:
http://www.kode54.net/bassmididrv/

We use this soundfont a lot, for instance in our song London Town.
The soundfont can easily be edited and improved with other seperate soundfonts on the internet.
You can use the programm Viena for this, you can download this one and other interesting programms here:
http://www.synthfont.com/Downloads.html

There is a downside though,if you want to export midi tracks in BiaB, the only way to do this is using the Coyote Synth.
To export the arrangement as WAV using the Magic Soundfont you will need a different method.
You will need to record the arrangement in real time with a programm such as Soundtap (not free).

We hope this might be helpful,
regards,
Rob & Anne-Marie

Welcome to the forum. Look forward to hearing your songs.

Thank you for taking the time to share the links.

Hi Jim,
We've already posted 2 songs:
Memories remain:
http://youtu.be/NBlwI9IASsM
and London Town:
http://youtu.be/mDMqoTvm0ls
Hope you like them.
There's more to come in the next couple of weeks.
Kind regards,
Rob and Anne-Marie

I used to use a lot of sound fonts back in the day. They were certainly a step up from the basic GM sounds that TTS and Coyote used.

I had, and probably still have an extensive collection of fonts on my laptop.

Once I discovered some of the professional packages that used samples and compared them to the fonts, I never used the fonts again.

Cakewalk's Sound center synth (included free with their DAW's now) is an amazingly nice sounding synth that uses samples. Also the NI stuff I have is all sampled. And... of course, the real band real tracks are all waves and sampled.....

So, basically, I have not use a font now in 5 years or more since I switched to this computer I built and only loaded the samplers. I'm not knocking the fonts, because they certainly did a fine job, it's just that there's a better way for me now.

Most often I find that the real tracks play the parts I need for background things....even the pianos. If there's a part I need played specifically, such as a riff on the piano or bass, I use the Cakewalk sound center and pick one of it's samples for the instrument.

It was great fun back in the early days to scour the internet looking for free fonts and installing them to compare the sounds. I found some pretty nice piano's and some other stuff...bass guitars and such. It was actually that process of searching for a certain instrument that lead me ultimately to find Band in A Box.

That single find, ended my searching in many aspects. Now, the searching I do is to find the next song......

Hello Guitarhacker,

We definitely agree that the quality of RealTracks and VSTI's like Native Instruments are far better than soundfonts. Once you've purchased the Ultra Plus Pak (or higher) using MIDI instruments becomes kind of obsolete. However, every now and then a good soundfont can come in handy. In some of BIAB's (MIDI-based) urban styles for instance.
In our latest post: 'Memories Remain', we used two separate guitar soundfonts. We also used one in 'London town', but that was before we bought the Ultra Plus Pak, which in our case also ended most of our search for additional Soundfonts and vsti's.
We are not familiar with Cakewalk's Sound Center Synth (Rob bought Z3ta and Cakewalk Musical Instruments -which is very good quality and very compatible with BIAB- years ago). Can the Sound Center Synth be purchased separately? And does it have a GM mapping? (Rob has a serious RSI problem and long searches for proper sound patches is not really an option for him).

And yes, our contemporary search is for new songs. Well, the arrangements almost present themselves in BIAB with the styles and Melodist feature.
The hardest part now is finding a good singing line and proper lyrics....

I think you can only get CSC with a cakewalk DAW..... but with MC6 being only $40 (It was on sale recently for $20) that would be a no brainer buy.

Does it have GM mapping. NOPE. Absolutely not. It is a sampled synth. The instruments in it are all samples. It only uses midi to trigger the samples. The break down in the list of instruments is : Bass, piano, etc.... and then you click into that category and have several other options....piano's for example have the 10 or so different Steinburg piano's.... bass has electric and acoustic sub categories and a number of basses in each.

It's a quick search to find, load, and try the different samples.

Lyrics..... the bane of my existence as a writer..... The music to me is the easy part..... those dang words..... forever trying to find the right ones