KVR Audio

7thsense · Post by **7thsense** » Tue Sep 07, 2004 9:26 am

I want to download or purchase a soundfont player, I see there are some freeware ones and there's the RGC player and soundfont.com's player. Will a freebie do the job?, what will I gain from a purchased one and how do they stack up against each other?

declassified · Post by **declassified** » Tue Sep 07, 2004 6:20 pm

As far as i know, the commercial ones (like Bismark) have some advanced features like filter, envelope or a 3-4band EQ.
I'd recommend using sfz and some effect plugins instead. Except if you have too much money...

Klemperer · Post by **Klemperer** » Tue Sep 07, 2004 6:41 pm

I agree, sfz is very fine. And, err, one might kill me in this forum, for soundfonts the soundblaster-cards are not that bad

. But sfz and the not tooooo expensive sfz+ are very fine, and with a bit of effects-adding here and there the vstis that include soundfonts in their synths are fine also. Synth-edit has a soundfont-player, kind of reduced in comparison with sfz though.

JerGoertz · Post by **JerGoertz** » Tue Sep 07, 2004 7:13 pm

There's a website which did a comparison of the fidelity in reproduction of various soundfont players and samplers, and it's quite surprising to see that most of them add harmonics (when doing pitch-shifting only? I don't remember). sfz (and sfz+) and the Buzz Jeskola sampler were the only 2 that were pretty much 100% faithful in their playback.

reprznt · Post by **reprznt** » Tue Sep 07, 2004 7:16 pm

is Jeskola freeware?

Jaidy · Post by **Jaidy** » Tue Sep 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Hey JerGoertz

Can you tell us the url for the site you mentioned?

ionized · Post by **ionized** » Tue Sep 07, 2004 7:42 pm

This is probably what JerGoertz was referring to:

http://www.buzzxp.com/samplers/

7thsense · Post by **7thsense** » Tue Sep 07, 2004 8:45 pm

Hey, my Emulator X has a converter that converts soundfonts so they can be used in it. Do you think this will eliminate my need for a soundfont player or will there still be some advantages to staying in the native format?

pHz · Post by **pHz** » Tue Sep 07, 2004 8:47 pm

surely the emuX loads soundfonts natively anyway ???

slainte

rob

flugel45 · Post by **flugel45** » Tue Sep 07, 2004 9:10 pm

pHz wrote:surely the emuX loads soundfonts natively anyway ???

slainte rob

It doesn't load E-MU EIII/IV format natively, so it's not likely it would with soundfonts.

JD

amoebe · Post by **amoebe** » Tue Sep 07, 2004 9:12 pm

Jeskola Xs-1 isn't freeware and it seems to be a dead product. If you're eager to purchase a soundfont player I'd choose sfz+ if I were you.
But give sfz a go, it's simple, it's free, it's very good.

pljones · Post by **pljones** » Tue Sep 07, 2004 10:34 pm

If you want to ask detailed questions about soundfonts, you need to read the E-Mu Soundfont 2.01 spec. It's, um, fascinating (as Spock would say). Now, you might think a soundfont is just a collection of WAVs with keyranges and velocity layers. This isn't the case. There's a proper wavetable synth specification that a player should implement.

I don't know of anyone but rgc:audio (and maybe Creative) who claim to fully and faithfully implement the SF2 spec.

Now, of course, you may find that faithfully implementing the spec causes "unexpected" effects (like there's a minimum attack time, IIRC, which is noticeable)... but you do get all the EG and LFO routing that can be defined.

7thsense · Post by **7thsense** » Wed Sep 08, 2004 1:45 am

good points, I just got the SFZ+ demo and the soundfonts in there do sound much better than in the EmuX after conversion.Has anyone tried the player at soundfont.com?? it's a lot cheaper than the sfz+ that's pretty high.

Rock Hardbuns · Post by **Rock Hardbuns** » Wed Sep 08, 2004 11:09 am

Is creatives player even a VSTi? It doesnt say so on the site. If its not, its not of much use, is it?

Difference in soundfont players, break it down please