First post, by gerwin
- Rank
- l33t
I have a few small SoundFonts (.SF2) that I like to use with midi music. I can think of several ways to do this:
-Software: Timidity++ in player or windows synthesiser mode
-Software: SFZ player plugin with SaviHost (there are other VST plugins too)
-Software: FluidSynth with Qsynth GUI
-Hardware: SB-AWE 32 CT1920 Goldfinch ISA
-Hardware: SB-Live! PCI
I have all of the above available and tested in Windows 98, but the hardware is not currently installed. I don't have any free PCI and ISA slots. 🙁
Since SoundFonts are quite useless in DOS, as all there is for Dos is a command line SF2 midi player, I will go for a Windows 98 solution. Now Timidity sounds very good and I got it quite nicely configured with a neat bat-file-menu to run as a player or as a server for Winamp with different soundfonts. In server mode it can be accessed by Winamp through MidiYoke as a virtual midi cable, but I can also connect midi-in to midi-out in hardware.
So that is the situation, and it is working well when just playing midi files manually. But the problem is that none of the three SF2 software synthesizers work well when used with Windows or Dos games (on my system). The music lags, stutters, has wrong instruments or gives hanging notes when a song changes. Sometimes the music is played OK for a little while, but it nearly always goes wrong when a level changes. This problem remains even when I set the SF2 software synthesizers to the lowest output quality. I find this quite odd, considering the Yamaha S-YXG50 software synthesizer (non-SF2) always worked fine with ZDoom. Any ideas?
PS: The Processor speed is 950MHz, The OS is windows 98.