Soundfonts

[JonathanDragonDJ]

i'm sure this topic has been covered a million times...but it's outside the pervue of my previous research....can someone please explain exactly what soundfonts are to me? i think they are a form of sample (hence using this forum) but i'm really not sure of more than that...or why one soundfont player is better than another...if you can just link me to a good answer that's great too

thanks superstaRs

[lawapa]

A font is a group of wave files Each file is one note of an instrument. In large soundfonts you can have a sample of each and every note of an instrument. But most only contain notes at intervals and all the in-between notes are derived through stretching down. All the files are keymapped. This tells the player what range to use a file in as in c3-f3. And fonts can have velocity layers. These layers are the same note but played softer and are ordered by velocity range. A 3 layer font is just a soft note, medium and a hard note. And each layer is given a range to sound. This is a sample set and it's defined by the Soundfont spec. Just like a hardware sample player soundset a lot of other settings come into play but a complete description can be found by doing a search for the soundfont spec. I do believe EMU developed it for soundcard use.

[P.T.]

There's a lot of info at www.soundfont.com.

sfz is a good soundfont player.

[JonathanDragonDJ]

the link didn't work

[P.T.]

Sorry, try this;

www.soundfont.com

Then click on Tutorials under Support.

I put a sentence ending period after the dot com and it made the period part of the link.