CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

I hear the term "sound fonts" being used a lot with midis, and how they can be downloaded and stuff. From what I've gathered, they can replace the sounds of instruments that are default to an midiplayer (eg, Winamp perhaps?), thus making them sound better/more realistic/different. So, my questions...

1. Is this true, or am I getting it wrong?

2. Is there a way how that I can instal these soundfonts to play in winamp with my midis?

umm i remember having something on my old soundblaster audigy that used soundfonts, i think you have to pay for them though, but i think your right, they do imitate instruments...i didnt google it, but im sure there is alot of information

well I found free soundfonts... still not sure how to use them

wow soundfonts.. that takes me back to college a bit, we created soundfonts. if your soundcard supports them (say a creative soundblaster) in you program menu under creative and your soundcard there should be a soundfont bank manager which lets you set the soundfont to be used by your soundcard. you may have to install teh soundfont files or extract them to the soundfont folder.
when set to use a particular soundfont any midi generated by your soundcard will use the soundfont.
thats about all i can remember at the moment. not dealt with them in years and it was only a small part of the class that dealt with soundfonts. i hope that helps.

hmm... how do I figure out what soundcard I have?

ok go into start menu>control panel>system>hardware>device manager

and click on sound, video and game controllers your sound card should be listed under there.

or "slaps head" silly me start menu>control panel>sounds & audio devices should be in there too.

In the consumer level, the Sound Blaster line of audio cards will have the capability to use soundfonts. The Soundblaster AWE 32\64, SB Live!, and SB Audigy line are suppose to support it.

Basically a soundfont is a library that contains recorded sound "samples" used to simulate an instrument on your computer. They are usually recorded in a .wav file and are organized to play the notes in a MIDI file. Since MIDI is basically "sheet music," all of the recorded insturments in a soundfont library fills\plays the notes that are programmed in the midi file. It's like using a synthesizer on your computer.

By default, a lot of the soundcards will have the standard "General Midi" soundfont, which contains the 128 instruments you will usually hear in a midi file. Though, you can stack different soundfonts together if you want to hear a different variety of the same instruments.

For example, if someone wanted to listen to a better "grand piano" sound, they can record samples from an actual piano using a microphone, and replace the GM version of the "grand piano" instrument. It does nothing to affect the other sounds that weren't touched in the GM soundfont.

There is a lot of work involved in soundfonts and usually it does come with a price tag before downloading them. Though I am sure there are some available for free. Just remember that their file extensions are ".sf" and .sf2 ."

I am convinced that my sound card (nForce) fits into the "hardware wavetable" category... however, after extensive research, I found out that the newer versions of the nForce drivers do not support dls or sf2 files
So, it appears that I'm not able to use all the .sf2 files that I found with my sound card. I tried older versions of the drivers that did have .sf2 support, and it didn't work, and it cause my system a lot of grief (flash files, in particular, wouldn't act propperly).

HOWEVER, I found this program called midig. It is a spanish program that acts as a "software wavetable synthesizer", I guess you could say. It came loaded with .sf2 files, and it plays midis with these sound fonts just wonderfully. However, it has no playlist support, so for every midi I want to play, I have to manually find and load it. Gets kinda old after a while, so my question is... are there other software wavetable synthesizer programs like this out there that have playlist support?

Edit: Nevermind, I found a wonderful program called Timidity++ that solved all my sf2 wants