soundfonts are samples, you can load them up,chop them up ,make your own drumsets,completely chop/remix a song with them, you could (as i do) assign different drum loops to different keys on a keyboard bass loops to other keys, vocals to others,if your using a sound blaster the best thing about it is you have control over the envelope!!!(swooping + whooshing effects)and you get reverb + chorus + stuff aswell..great little card (i use 2)... in cakewalk you sample sounds and play them back
in cake 9 (which is a pain to setup the hd buffers properly) you quickly use up audio tracks... and the play will stop when things get to complicated... saving out the audio tracks,cutting them up with an audio editor,making them into soundfonts (vienna)
and attaching them into cakewalk saves hd buffers... also free-ing up audio tracks for more yakes hope this helps....