appiah4 wrote:

AWE cards come with 512K Ram.. Are there any soundfonts that make this amount actually useful and more pleasant than what is in the ROM (Not a fan of AWE MIDI) or FM Synthesis?

I think it's mostly useful for tracker music, where all samples are included in the music file.
If you try to stuff an entire MIDI set in there, it's not likely to sound better than the ROM.

I also can't think of a "reasonable" soundfont that will fit into that space and that will sound better than the standard 1MB ROM.
However, you can use the 512k to "supplement" the standard 1MB ROM.
Under DOS, the 512k RAM is used to load additional samples for the MT-32 and GS (General Standard) compatibility modes.
Under Windows, you can load custom soundfonts and then "replace" (i.e., remap) them with some of the samples contained in the standard 1MB ROM set.
Been a long time since I've played with it, so I might be slightly off with what I've stated above.

That's what I thought as well, but even though there are a lot of 4MB fonts for the Gold, stuff that mimics the SC-55 for example, there doesn't seem to be any 512K fonts out in the wild that try to improve the stock ROM stuff that are particularly bad like percussions and guitars.. Has anyone come across something to this effect? 512K is just lying there unused in my system and it makes me sad.

Scali wrote:

I think it's mostly useful for tracker music, where all samples are included in the music file.

I only came across one .MOD player specifically intended for use with the AWE32/AWE64, and even that one specifically noted that it was mostly useless without an upgrade.

Jorpho wrote:

I only came across one .MOD player specifically intended for use with the AWE32/AWE64, and even that one specifically noted that it was mostly useless without an upgrade.

Well yea, you should get a GUS for mods/trackers 😀

awemp for the win! love playing songs like 'fa-pride.it' demons pride, the virutal channels in .it files work fantastic on the awe32 with its sample memory.

https://files.scene.org/view/parties/1996/nai … ul/fa-pride.zip

I used to make separate .sf2s for my midi files using select instruments from good-quality banks.

This way I could play files like PASSPORT.MID or CANYON.MID in 4MB quality (or near that) having only 512k card: with a custom-made .sf2 that included only instruments used in particular .mid.

But I had to switch the soundfonts very often 😀

Jorpho wrote:

Scali wrote:

I think it's mostly useful for tracker music, where all samples are included in the music file.

I only came across one .MOD player specifically intended for use with the AWE32/AWE64, and even that one specifically noted that it was mostly useless without an upgrade.

Impulse Tracker will happily use the AWE's sampler & mix in hardware (AWE32/64 is the best sound card for IT, IMO.) The problem with having 512k is the EMU8000 only supports 16-bit samples so IT has to up-convert before loading them in. In other words, you can play a module of max. 256kB of (extremely common) 8-bit samples. You get 512k of 16-bit samples but they're twice as big anyway. 😜 Still, there are tons of excellent mods out there that fit in that limitation.

AllSoundTracker is another interesting one made specifically for the AWE line and is fun to use with some neat features, if a bit buggy. Same limitations as IT with 512k though.

Azarien wrote:

I used to make separate .sf2s for my midi files using select instruments from good-quality banks.

This way I could play files like PASSPORT.MID or CANYON.MID in 4MB quality (or near that) having only 512k card: with a custom-made .sf2 that included only instruments used in particular .mid.

But I had to switch the soundfonts very often 😀

Yea, the GUS came with a MIDI player that basically did the same, except you just had to create an .ini file listing the instruments you wanted to load. You don't have to pack it into a soundbank yourself, it just loaded them on-the-fly.
That way you don't waste any memory on all the GM instruments the song isn't using 😀