Jeff, there's a subtle problem with using sfz format on a Mac: sfz.dll is a PC-only plug-in (at the moment). The text file would only be of actual use on a PC. René sees the Mac as a dying platform for music creation and has said he's not particularly interested in porting to it (same for things like powercore). Of course, any SF2 built from the sfz format mapping would be cross-platform. (Just have to be careful that you don't use sfz features not in SF2. The opposite applies to: SF2 lets you modulate the depth of modulators, as I read it - I don't think sfz format supports this.)learjeff wrote:SFZ format -- well, summagun! If I'd have known about that, I probably wouldn't have bothered writing code to piece together sf2 files! I really had a bitch of a time figuring out that when the Soundfont spec said that the high order byte specifies the low key/velocity, and vice versa, that they were wrong. (And it's NOT an endian-ness problem on my end!) I sure wish I had those hours back!
Since I use the SFZ player to test my sounds (now that Giga breaks my computer so I can't use it), I'll probably adjust my tools to build an SFZ control file until everything works.
If someone would write a portable app to convert from SFZ format into soundfont, then I could just publish the SFZ format as a RAR file, and point to the app. Since RAR is supported on Mac, this might alleviate a lot of problems. It would make it trivial to exchange new presets and control settings, because that's just a text file.
Feel free to say more about this, but take it to a new thread. I already have a Python app that does half the job. Add a parser for SFZ and a bit more infrastructure and that would do it, but Python is a lot to download and install for a little app like this should be. Plus my app is DOS command-line, no good for the general public.
Second point: Extreme Sample Converter "supports" sfz format and Soundfonts. I was very disappointed with how poorly it performed in some conversions I did of Computer Music patches (DS-404, Kontakt and HALion)... but I'd not heard what the originals sound like. Otherwise, I'd say it would be a useful tool for building the SF2 from the samples+sfz format mapping.
What's probably better, if you want to go to SF2, then, is to convert the sfz format mapping into sf2comp input (...get sf2comp working...) and use that.
Third
- I'd rather drop SF2 entirely. For me, its only advantage is that sfz will use "direct from disk" mode, enabling huge samplesets (such as a Rhodes SF2 I got recently somewhere...) to be used. If it did DFD for sfz format mappings, I'd be happy. (I'm with René on the Mac front - I'd rather he spent his time getting the PC versions of his plugins improved and developed. Mac owners can go buy one of them Receptor boxes... 
)