Sound card emulation

[fabkebab1]

Hi there guys -

I did a search on this and was not able to find my original post (from about a year ago, admittedly) or anything else similar.

I used to have a computer in about 1992 and could play midi through it using Powerchords Pro- The "instruments" sounded great and were well sampled.

After a little bit of searching, I have been able to get the same midi music software on my current computer (a one year old sony Vaio desktop). The thing is the sounds in my new computer sound rubbish compared to the old computer, presumably because I had a better sound card back then (with better instrument sounds, at least)

As a reply to a previous post, someone said that you could actually load instrument patches onto the computer and use software to emulate the output of the instrument sounds, thus bypassing the horrible instument patches in the soundcard - does anyone know anything about this? Where do I download patches, and where would I obtain an "emulator"?

thanks

 

[TimOBrien]

If you have an SBLive or Creative soundcard it can use "soundfonts" which are samples of real instruments. Some are very very good and loads of free soundfonts can be found at www.hammersound.net Check out www.soundfont.com for a primer.

With any soundcard and music program that uses VST plugins you can use a soundfont player that will allow the same thing. www.rgcaudio.com has a free one called "sfz player". I use a commercial one from Bismark "BS-16" that also works great.

Or you can use a number of other sampler players that will replace the sounds using other types of sampled sounds: Kontact, Kompact, Halion, GigaStudio, Motu Mach5, etc.

 

[fabkebab1]

Thanyou for the quick and very full response! I will look into those things for sure!!