Hi,

i'm looking for a good low budget and stable soundfont player.
Got the demo of jeskola xs-1 and it sounds ok.
I don't have the money for Kontakt etc...
Can somebody help?

Take a look at the free stuff that's being made with SynthEdit: ESEF, Fontaminator, etc.

try sf-play
i updated it yesterday

http://odo.nl.nu

fontaminator and esef looks great but cannot be compared to jeskola, they take a lot of cpu too, i'm gone try sf-play from odo now

thnx crim

odo sf-play sounds exactly like esef and fontaminator

Old but relieable: try bs-1

http://homepage.mac.com/bismark/english.html
http://www.kvr-vst.com/inst.php?inst=7

Kinet, I went with Jeskola. It's not perfect but IMO it's the best of the bunch.

Let's just say it gets the job done.

That's because they are all made with synthedit.

How about this one:
http://homepage.mac.com/bismark/bs-1/readme_english.html

EDIT: aaahhh...trekstar beat me to it

It depends on what you want. If you only want to play the raw samples of a SF2, the SynthEdit creations will possibly be good enough for you. If you want to have a sound as identical as possible to the original soundfont, it will be better to buy XS-1 or VSampler2.75, or perhaps BS-1 (they also have some more or less restrictions, but are far better than the SE players). If you can load DXis in your sequencer, you can take LiveSynth Pro.

out of everything i tried, fruity sf player sounded/worked the best. I have not heard jeskola.

ok, bs-1 is tested now, and sounds much better than the SE's, jeskola sounds warmer, fuller. What i'm looking is a straight sf player, no editing etc...is needed. So much good SF are available on the net that's it's worth to search for a good player. And the sound is really depending to the player.
Does anyone knows if the sampler in reason plays the sf2.
Or is an extra old SB-soundcard not maybe the best because of the latency and no cpu overcharge?

You could use a SB-card, but be aware that you can't route the Soundfonts played with a soundcard through the mixer of Cubase e.g.
So all the mixing and effect possibilities of your sequencer are not usable.
Those songs will always sound somehow like a cheesy midi-file.

I think that's no alternative. It depends on your needs.

TrekStar wrote:

You could use a SB-card, but be aware that you can't route the Soundfonts played with a soundcard through the mixer of Cubase e.g. So all the mixing and effect possibilities of your sequencer are not usable. Those songs will always sound somehow like a cheesy midi-file. I think that's no alternative. It depends on your needs.

But SBLive and Audigy has very good built in and editable effects themselves, which you can control via midi CCs (but only 2 effects at the same time for each channel).

[kinet] odo sf-play sounds exactly like esef and fontaminator

as ive said before here ... there might well be a reason for that ...

[crimmie] That's because they are all made with synthedit.

and thats only PARTLY it ...

seriously ... there are limitations with the synthedit .sf2 player [although jeff is working to improve it all the time ... it IS only a small part of what the app does and he has other priorities at the moment ] ... fontaminator was never really intended to be JUST a straight .sf2 player so i wouldnt usually recommend it as such ... and esef was the vst i cut my synthedit teeth on [not bad considering ... ] ...

as an alternative to those already mentioned ... try audiosynth from jorgen at http://www.webmassiva.com ... for the money its as good a sampler as they come [and is due a major update soon] ...

... cheers rob

I got VSampler with Sonar and later upgraded to the full version. I've never had any problems with it, though I don't use it often. For what it does, it does it well.

Robert

as an aside ... new fontaminator beta [04a2] now available from the 'instruments' section at ...

eXpeRIMentFOUR

... cheers rob

i tried the beta Vsampler3, but crash the system all the time, an old 2.7 demo works ok.
Bs1 looks good for price, Jeskola sounds better for a nice price too.

I'm quiet sorry for the SE sf-players, they sounds too hard for me. No warmth and "finesse"

Or can someone tell me that it IS worth to pay so much for Kontakt, i like NI, got Reaktor and i'm looking serieusly for Absynth. But can't have it all.

The case is that i'm also waiting for a good emulator for a lot of Ensoniq ASR10 samples that sounds the BEST of all. Chicken rubber translator don't work ok for ensoniq layer samples.
Maybe someone knows more about that too....

Thanks for the good advice, i'll keep looking.

You may want to check out this Kontaket thread.

http://www.kvr-vst.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12364

Quote:

You could use a SB-card, but be aware that you can't route the Soundfonts played with a soundcard through the mixer of Cubase e.g. So all the mixing and effect possibilities of your sequencer are not usable. Those songs will always sound somehow like a cheesy midi-file

That's partly true but the sblive's soundfont playback sounds much more lively and accurate than any of the software alternatives. I use it as a second soundcard for extra things like for ride cymbols and crashes, pads and other things..

A wicked effect you can to with sblive's is create a pad, then run it through the vowel effect, then route that through a chorus then route that into delay.. Sounds wicked with sharp-stabby choir sounds

What about the Audigy 2?? Does that have more fx that can be used at once? It has a much bigger processor than the old sblive?? So what's the deal?

Anyway, nobody has mentioned using fruityloops VSTi as a sf2 player.. You have to purchase the fruity sf2 player aswell, but it is as good as livesynth DXi, which is pretty much flawless, perfect sf2 playback.. Initially the fruity VSTi uses a bit of cpu on my p4 1.9, but each instance of the sf2 player uses bugger-all really. Even with high polyphony. It even plays BlueJay drums flawlessly.

Other than that, Jeskola XS-1 is quite good, bs-1 is good if you don't plan to use much polyphony (fairly accurate but inefficient), Kontakt is great for some sf2's but crap at others (like sf2's with loop points), halion is even worse, EXS(P)24 is generally fairly good but crappy at velocity mapping, Virtual Sampler is one of the best and surprisingly so is NI Battery. Battery even play's a pretty complex rhodes bank I have real accurately that failed on most of the others.. But generally it's not designed to be a multitimbral instrument.. The synthedit ones don't cut it (sorry but it's true) Gotta be efficient in my book I'm afraid Only the best for AudioWhore hehe!

AudioWhore wrote:

... the sblive's soundfont playback sounds much more lively and accurate than any of the software alternatives... A wicked effect you can to with sblive's is create a pad, then run it through the vowel effect, then route that through a chorus then route that into delay.. Sounds wicked with sharp-stabby choir sounds .... Other than that, Jeskola XS-1 is quite good, bs-1 is good if you don't plan to use much polyphony (fairly accurate but inefficient), ..., halion is even worse, EXS(P)24 is generally fairly good but crappy at velocity mapping, Virtual Sampler is one of the best ...

Yes, I totally agree to that.

After a long try out, here is my verdict:

***** jeskola xs-1 for the best sound
**** fruity loops soundfontplayer, very good + the extra's of fruity self
*** AudioSynth, stable, sounds better then SE sf-players.
** Kontakt because expensive
* The synth edit sf players, free but too not so good sound.

great missing test Virtual Sampler - the demo's were not working

conclution: i think it's going be Fruity Loops

I will give this list to Santa Claus + Absynth and will see
Thanks for all the good advice.

btw.: i saw on the site of Fruity Loops that the guys are my neightbours Just 1 mile from here.......

I use Fruity for song creation, and would have chosen its SF-player except for one minor flaw: it doesn't support MIDI sustain pedal. Apart from that, it sounds great and seems to load and play soundfonts correctly. For my purposes, one of the reasons I wanted an SF-player is to include piano soundfonts in my recordings, and with piano, sustain pedal is absolutely necessary. For mostly monophonic instruments like cello, etc, sustain pedal is rarely needed.

The XS-1 seems to tax my system quite a bit when I use a large piano soundfont. I have an SBLive card, which is not exactly known for its speed, so this might be part of the problem. When I include the XS-1 in a fruity project lately, I get lots of buffer underruns (crackles) while recording. The only way to avoid it is to use a high buffer setting, with an annoyingly long latency.

Of course, the SBLive supports soundfonts, but being unable to route them to effects channels is enough to prevent me from using them at all.

Do any other Jeskola XS-1 users experience high CPU usage? Do larger soundfonts cause higher CPU usage? (seems obvious, but what do I know.) Probably the most obvious advice would be to get a new soundcard with ASIO, am I right?

This may seem a bit of a strange choice but out of all the soundfont players I have tried the best to me is the VSTi version of Emagics EXS sampler - the EXSP24. Its not a full sampler like its big (but Logic only) brother but it has enough options for me and plays soundfonts with a lot of character and warmth. The only downside is you need to place the soundfonts in its own folder for it to recognise and convert but if you just make that folder your central repository for soundfonts like I do then it won't be too inconvenient. Its also quite cheap and if you don't want the full sound mangling potential of Kontakt but do want something that is less of a CPU hog than the Jeskola XS1 and warmer than the Synthedit freebies I would go for this (and it also plays other formats like AKAI).

Don't go for the fruity player - it loads big soundfonts extremely slowly and inefficiently.

Jee, i'm doubting again, now, the sustain pedal is not such a problem for me, for piano it's important, but i got a big digital Roland that sounds pretty good and with a wonderfull keyboard. So piano sounds, claves etc... are played with it.

I'll have a new try with the EXS tomorrow and see, i thought it couldn't play the SF2's.....

About the latency, i'm working with a Mia card with ASIO WDM, and it's good for me, only the cpu is a bit old, p3-800mhz, but i have no budget now for a new computer..

You just have to put the SF2s in its soundfont samples folder and it recognises them automatically - then when you choose which instrument to play from the drop down menu it gets converted to exs format. I tried lots of programs myself too, including all the ones you have and I find it simple but musical. It handles the large sf2's as well as it handles the smaller ones and has simple controls too.

However if you want some thing more fully featured I would still go for Kontakt but it is expensive.


btw - I'm still on an Athlon 500 and a SBLive with KXdrivers but I can still get 20-30 ms latency in most apps and less in the better ones.

grease wrote:

The XS-1 seems to tax my system quite a bit when I use a large piano soundfont. I have an SBLive card, which is not exactly known for its speed, so this might be part of the problem. When I include the XS-1 in a fruity project lately, I get lots of buffer underruns (crackles) while recording. The only way to avoid it is to use a high buffer setting, with an annoyingly long latency. ... Probably the most obvious advice would be to get a new soundcard with ASIO, am I right?

The advantage of XS-1 is that it loads only the actually used patch of a soundfont, so it´s extremely fast and doesn´t need much RAM. Many other SF2-sampler and the SBLive itself are loading the whole soundfont and so they need a lot of RAM when there is a large soundfont.

You can have ASIO with the SBLive using the Cubase ASIO driver for it (it´s downloadable for free if you are searching for it). I´m using that driver for my SBLive for more than a year now and am getting a latency for all VST-instruments of 11 ms without problems (possibly you have to deactivate the audio in inside the ASIO driver window for not having sound crackling).

how come no ppl recommend LIVESYNTH PRO? I find them good too!

Hello.

How about Timidity++? It's GPL'd and does an excellent job of rendering midis to wavs. It can apply chorus and reverb on its own, but I find that external FX work much better. Another, perhaps better, choice would be Audio Compositor, but it's commercial. AC is extremely slooow, but stunning, just judging from the demo.
Neither is a VSTI, so I'll probably get laughed off this forum...
Anyway, here are the URLs:

Timidity++ http://www.goice.co.jp/member/mo/timidity/
Audio Compositor http://home.att.net/~audiocompositor/

-- Just another f*cking observer

kamlan wrote:

how come no ppl recommend LIVESYNTH PRO? I find them good too!

.

I mentioned it already, but it´s only a DXi and a standalone anf they don´t have any plans to make it a VSTi.

AndreasEhrhardt wrote:

(possibly you have to deactivate the audio in inside the ASIO driver window for not having sound crackling).

Andreas - I'm having that problem (crackling) at the moment with some apps with my KX ASIO rivers - sorry for my ignorance but how do you do that (please keep it non technical)

Thanks

aMUSEd, I don´t have the kX ASIO drivers, so I can´t help you with that, sorry (but they have a forum). I´ve heard that there are many problems with them. But you can find the Cubase 5 ASIO driver for the SBLive which I mentioned above (which not only works with Cubase but also with other sequencers) here

http://home.t-online.de/home/pegasus-wtal/Tips/tips.htm#Asio%20Drivers %20for%20SB-LIVE!

and an explanation how to use them

thanks for the tip on the drivers.

however, before I download them and make the change, could you comment on them a little further if you have a moment?

who made them (where did they come from)?
do they operate at 48 kHz only, or will they do 44.1?
do you know how they compare to the kX drivers?

any other notes on your experience with them would be helpful - i'm a little nervous about changing drivers. (maybe i shouldn't worry so much - how hard would it be to revert back to the SBLive if i wanted?)

sorry for all the questions. drivers are something i'm not too familiar with.

Quote:

This may seem a bit of a strange choice but out of all the soundfont players I have tried the best to me is the VSTi version of Emagics EXS sampler - the EXSP24. Its not a full sampler like its big (but Logic only) brother but it has enough options for me and plays soundfonts with a lot of character and warmth. The only downside is you need to place the soundfonts in its own folder for it to recognise and convert but if you just make that folder your central repository for soundfonts like I do then it won't be too inconvenient. Its also quite cheap and if you don't want the full sound mangling potential of Kontakt but do want something that is less of a CPU hog than the Jeskola XS1 and warmer than the Synthedit freebies I would go for this (and it also plays other formats like AKAI). Don't go for the fruity player - it loads big soundfonts extremely slowly and inefficiently.

EXSP24 is pretty cool cpu wise, I totally agree, but I found it had trouble with quite a few sf2's like a few of my favourite rhodes banks which didn't seem to have any dynamics (min velocity set to 127) but it's great for chopped up drumloops and single hit samples!

I might end up getting an Audigy 2 alongside my M-Audio Audiophile.. Dunno if it will be that much better but atleast it will be quieter than my current Sblive value for soundfonts..

well, i tested the EXS24 and .... (i'm very sorry) but it was quiet chocking, aside that it seems to be very stable and a good respons on the keyboard ( latency and velocity), the sound is not much better then....the SynthEdit ones , hard,sharp no warmth at all - in other words not the real sound of the SF.
I compared it next to next in cubase with the JeskolaXS1 and it was amazing what a difference.

Jeskola remains as winner, for the price and the coming free instruments for it etc...

Now i'm gone check the Reason demo and see with the NN19....
that could be a good treat too

grease wrote:

... who made them (where did they come from)? do they operate at 48 kHz only, or will they do 44.1? do you know how they compare to the kX drivers? any other notes on your experience with them would be helpful - i'm a little nervous about changing drivers. (maybe i shouldn't worry so much - how hard would it be to revert back to the SBLive if i wanted?) ...

Steinberg made them and they operate at 44.1 and 48 kHz. I didn´t try the KX drivers yet, so I can´t compare them.

You will not have problems with them, because these are additional ASIO drivers and the SBLive MME and Direct sound drivers will remain unaffected. So you can use these ASIO drivers and the SBLive drivers side by side.