sound fonts

[sandwiches]

hi...

i'm only just starting to dabble into the electronic music side of recording, adding in artifical instruments and stuff...

and i was wondering... what exactly are soundfonts? from the term, it sounds like the configurations that govern how MIDI instruments are played or something.

but is that all they are? could someone give me a brief intro to them and how they are used and stuff?

 

[Stealthtech]

Soundfonts are generally sound clips or instruments stored on a stock audio card like the soundblaster series.
They can be triggered via midi with an external midi device.(general midi keyboard in most cases)
Usually a bank of 127 general midi sounds or instruments on a standard card.

 

[tdukex]

Yes, as Stealthtech said, soundfonts are basically soundbanks (full of .wav samples) that you trigger via MIDI, either by playing a MIDI file in your sequencer or by actually performing on a MIDI controller like a keyboard. With a simple $35 Soundblaster 5.1 card and the Creative software that comes with it, you can load soundfont banks into your computer's memory. You can load soundfonts whose size equals 1/2 the amount of memory you have installed. So if you have 512 mb of memory you can actually load a huge 256 mb soundfont bank. I haven't looked on the net in a while, but the largest I have is 128mb. There is some software that plays soundfonts also, but I haven't tried any of it.

http://www.soundfont.com/tutorials/sf20white.pdf

http://www.soundfont.com/documents/sfspec21.pdf

http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.nsf/files/E5F90F70241EFF6D862566B20024C532

http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.nsf/files/E8FC6F1272005BC0862568D700634565

http://hammersound.net/cgi-bin/soundlink.pl

That should keep you busy for a while.

Do a Google search and I'm sure you'll find lots more

 

[AlChuck]

Soundfonts are generally sound clips or instruments stored on a stock audio card like the soundblaster series.

Not quite. Sound Fonts are stored on a hard drive or a CD-ROM or other storage medium. They are loaded onto a compatible soundcard but cannot be stored there. Compatible soundcards have a block of RAM that holds the data for playback but no storage capacity.