Sound Fonts?

Sampler and Sampling discussion (techniques, tips and tricks, etc.)
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i use the free sfz (and now I could kick myself for buying Slayer2 when I should have gone after sfz+, but live and learn and sometime in March when all the Xmas bills are whittled down, maybe I can pick up sfz+ ) I haven't really checked it out, but its my impression sfz+ can also use gig files. (Somehow I doubt that the free sfz can.)

There's a sticky thread down in the rgc support forum to sort out the best of the free soundfonts available. the last i checked it had sort of stalled out. It really makes sense to me that this should be forum wide, rather than confined to the rgc forum.

some links from there have proved some exceptionally nice choirs, pianos and string ensembles. Much nicer than expected for free.

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"I'm sure NI could do a Kontakt version. Doug"

Doug,
We already have a Kontakt version of DIVA.
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"I'd much rather see vsti's of your intruments instead of soundfonts"
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We are in GIGA, Kontakt and Halion.
I will look into vsti

FB

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Bela D Media wrote:"I'm sure NI could do a Kontakt version. Doug"

Doug,
We already have a Kontakt version of DIVA.
I meant something like the GPO-with-Kontakt-package where the "VSTI" is a customized version of Kontakt.

It'll be interesting to see what comes next from this. I love your demos.

Doug
Logic is a pretty flower that smells bad - Spock, in "I, Mudd"

For a good time click http://www.belindabedekovic.com/video_fl_en.htm

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Thank you about the demos, Doug. :D

I could not have found better composers. I love these guys. I own them much for their time and involvement.

You make a great point/suggestion.

I can tell you that Voci will be available on two levels. One is the Bela D version 4 CD's+ or DVD
and then the GPO version 1 CD that will work in the same manner as GPO.

Huston Haynes is my development guy - I passed your post over to him.

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The good thing about creating a vsti, to me, is that it makes things simpler for both the developer and the user: the developer can avoid having to create separate versions of the multisample for separate softsamplers (although I realize that you've already done this), thus cutting down on both develoment and support times, and the learning curve required to know everything about all the major softsamplers.

For the buyer, the obvious advantage is that there is no need to buy a softsampler, and the CPU load is smaller. A vsti is also simpler to use--to use Kontakt, you have to load Kontakt into your sequencer, and then load the instrument. (Somehow I hate this extra step--am I just getting lazy?)

The only drawback that I see to using a vsti is that the developers seem to have to give the user less control over the samples in vsti's, or at least make it harder to control the sounds. For example, in the Plugsound keyboard collection, you can't control a filter with velocity, and of course you can't move the samples around or edit one of them in a wave editor. (But the plugsounds thing is a good collecton of sounds, I should add.)

In any case, I think that if the development cost is not too high, creating a good vsti would be a way of attracting customers--people who own Cubase or Cubasis any other vst sequencer, and who can't afford both a softsampler and a good library, could just buy the vsti. And there may be more people like me, who use Kontakt and Giga, but had just as soon have a vsti, if the sound is as good as the full library and enough control is given over the instrument. Sorry for the long post.

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Or, you could see if René/rgcaudio would do a custom sfz/sfz+-based sample playback engine (i.e. with a locked down set of samples to pick from and a custom skin/UI) for less than the cost of developing a VSTi from scratch...

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This is all great stuff guys.
A developer is nothing without a user so - feedback me anytime.

Bela D Media.com
http://www.beladmedia.com

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I use Soundfonts all the time. I've bought a disc of vinage keyboard Soundfonds for $30. But there are TONS of good free ones out there.

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I didn't use soundfonts until about a month ago. Then I got into them because I just don't have the time to build my own drumkits from samples I make or pick out. It's way easier to grab tons of already made kits off the net, and you get just as much drumsample variety as you would grabbing them individually.

And the quality doesn't really matter much to me as long as they sound decent. If I want a realistic drum sound I'll go with a real drummer. Otherwise I don't really care how processed or lo-fi'd they are because I'll just take it even further!

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i use lots of soundfonts. the most expensive i have ever bought would be the some of the sonic implants ones, i think the most i spent for one bank was $69. the other commercial ones i have enjoyed are the emu recreations of some of their hardware units. these are downloadable for about $39. of course i would be interested in sf2's of the bela d media stuff, but only if there wasn't a native format for my main sampler of choice, which is exs24 in logic and an undecided in tracktion (probably will end up with kontakt)

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Jake Johnson wrote:The good thing about creating a vsti, to me, is that it makes things simpler for both the developer and the user: the developer can avoid having to create separate versions of the multisample for separate softsamplers (although I realize that you've already done this), thus cutting down on both develoment and support times, and the learning curve required to know everything about all the major softsamplers.
And the flip side of that, I would really prefer a library NOT be locked to a VSTi, then that means I have to have a VSTi host on that system. I like the fact that I can load ANY of my samples within Giga, and Giga runs perfectly fine on my 1ghz machine. If I tried to do this with Kompakt players, I'd be dead in the water on such a low spec-ed machine. Anything that eats additional resources, I prefer to avoid, and having to load in multiple VSTi's to play back samples would kinda suck. I like having one host eating up a little bit of memory, so I can load a lot more samples. Giga96 allows me to do 32 channels, which is nice.

As for learning curve, dragging a sound into a track/bank is pretty darn easy. Easier than learning yet another VSTi, once you know your host sample player.

Also, I don't use Sound Fonts, and don't have any plans to look at them in the near future either.

Devon

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1. I have found them to be more useful as of late, especially when presented with a project that has a very short timeframe. I find this happening quite a bit lately. :)

2. I find myself using them more often. If the quality's good enough, I definitely would not rule them out. I am looking forward to trying SFZ+ down the road as soon as the budget opens up for it. :D

3. The most I have ever paid for a soundfont is somewhere in the ballpark of $30-40 USD.
Keith
Neuromancer-9000 System Admin.
MP3 site for the time being
"There's too much blood in my caffeine system..."

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