My very best advice is to skip the SB Live and use a software synth to play SoundFonts in your DAW. There are many advantages to this, assuming a DAW that can host soft-synths and a reasonably powerful computer. Following is a little explanation I put together for my friends who use Sonar, to explains the pros and cons of this approach. At that time I had an Audigy, not an SB Live, but the same principles apply. (And now I'm back to an SB Live, but used only to edit SoundFonts.)
I recently changed how I employ SoundFonts in Sonar - using the LiveSynth Pro SoundFont player instead of the Audigy hardware. There are a lot of advantages to using LiveSynth Pro, but first the disadvantage:
LiveSynth Pro taxes the CPU more than the Audigy, but not a lot on a modern computer. I have one project that has 17 separate instances of LiveSynth, and on my 2.26 GHz. P4 the CPU indicator in Sonar hovers around 40% with the Latency set to 4 milliseconds. If I increase the Latency slider to 10 milliseconds the CPU usage goes down to 25%, and 10 ms is still plenty fast.
However, the advantages are many. In approximate order of importance:
1. It solves all of the Audigy SoundFont playback bugs permanently. Even future bugs. :->)
2. You can EQ individual MIDI instruments! You can also apply any other audio plug-in effects like echo and compression individually.
3. You can use different types and amounts of reverb on each MIDI instrument, and the reverb quality [with the Ultrafunk plug-ins I use] is noticeably better than the Audigy's reverb. And since the LiveSynth can use reverbs already on the Aux busses for audio tracks, there's no increase in CPU use for that.
4. You can make a mix to a single Wave file by simply telling Sonar to do so. This is a LOT easier than having to balance the MIDI and Audio portions, or record through WhatUHear which adds more noise than recording the Synth directly. And with an Audigy you have to mix in real time while recording to a new track in Sonar or to a new file in SoundForge. All of that goes away with LiveSynth, making mixing easier and faster.
5. It uses memory more efficiently, by loading only the instrument groups the song actually needs, leaving more memory for the computer.
6. Reorganizing my SoundFonts offers more instrument variations. Before, only some of my SoundFont collection was in the banks I kept loaded at all times. Now I have one file containing only basses, another with only drum sets, etc., so I can load only the instrument categories I need, without wasting memory for all the other instruments I'm not using in a song.