wrote:Soundfonts make all the difference. The 8MB soundfont is pretty good. Fluid soundfont is the best, but you need to use SBDyn! in order to get it loaded on Live/Audigy cards.
I've never heard of "SBDyn!". Do you have a URL? How does it compare to MegaFont?
Well, it, uh, doesn't crash on startup, for one thing...heh
Yes, it’s my fault.
dnewhous, the only, or at least most visible (audible?) improvement you may get in hardware as opposed to software would be the reverb. But there are other ways of dealing with that without having to find a daughter-card. And yes, LAPC-1 is essentialy an MT-32 on an ISA board. I bought one about an year ago. I also purchased a SoundCanvas board at that time, and cvompared it to the Microsoft GS SoftSynth. Didn't notice a particularly "noticeable" difference (other than reverb, and maybe some different volume settings here and there), which is not so surprising given that both the SCC and the MS DLS were made by Roland.
Vlad, I know there are a lot of people over at Quest Studios who would say you are on crack for suggesting one of those daughtercards doesn't sound significantly better than the Microsoft softsynth. I have to ask, what speakers/headphones/soundcard were you making the comparison with?
I have listened to an mp3 from an actual SC-55 and it sounds far beyond anything produced by soundfonts or softsynths. The SCB-55 is supposed to be idenitical to the SC-55 mark II.
When comparing the softsynth to a hardware solution the hardware solution will, possibly, sound better (it's mainly the reverb and antialiasing algos that make the difference.) However, when comparing two GM/GS solutions, be they software or hardware, to the MT-32, they both sound equally bad.
These being said, I had a SCC-1 in my old Pentium, and the difference between its output and the WIn2k soft-synth was actually not that noticeable to me - keep in mind, though, that we're talking '90s game music here, simple, nothing too complex on polyphony and multitonality. The only difference I could notice was the reverb and/or antialiasing I mentioned (the SCC had a warmer and deeper quality).
Cheers,
V.
What does anti-aliasing mean?
gm.dls has 22k sampled cymbals. I bet you didn't get to hear that.
Antialiasing is for reducing/eliminating artifacts due to sampling during scaling-down (of images or sounds.)
V.
