Freeware Soundfont Player apart from SFZ?

[videzyrah]

I guess I may have misinterpreted what was stated in the manual at first:

"Soundfonts are a very flexible format and can include many things including descriptions of multiple instruments which may be layered together, envelopes, effects, and much else.Crystal only uses soundfonts as a source of waveforms, so this additional information is ignored by Crystal. If you have a soundfont with these extra bits and you'd like to hear the full soundfont, not just the waveform, try a sampler or dedicated soundfont player like Jeskola."

[metamorphosis]

?

Huh?

It plays Soundfonts. So how's that different to a Soundfont player? I really don't get these weird definitions. I often see people posting about how some sampler isn't a rompler, or a rompler isn't a sampler, or a sampler with all the features of a synth isn't a synth. It plays Soundfonts, therefore it is a Soundfont player. You can load any Soundfont you want in Crystal, same as any "Soundfont player". As far as I can remember it actually has more functionality than most straight players - all that semi-modular stuff, and IIRC all 3 layers can play their own Soundfonts. Why won't it produce the same result as any other Soundfont player playing Soundfonts? Seriously - why won't it?

Most soundfont players don't fully support the format. That's why only Sfz and Synthfont are listed in the sticky topic in the Samples etc forum.
Partial support (such as what Crystal and Shortcircuit have) usually leaves out such important things as attack/etc envelopes, correct looping, correctly intepreting sound volumes, correctly reading soundfonts... the list goes on, and on, and on.
A full soundfont player can be expected to implement the playback standard as close to the original Creative software/hardware as possible, including support for the above.
Cheers,
m@t

[kritikon]

OK - I didn't know that. You live and learn.

I still think Crystal is one of the better SF players though - especially for free. Looping points are important to be sure...although I've never experienced any problems with glitches with Crystal. As for envelopes etc - I can't imagine there's any true SF player that has more envelopes than Crystal...and ones that can be sourced to so many destinations. Certainly I'd try something like Crystal before buying anything commercial (and usually I don't recommend freebies over decent commercial stuff).