VOGONS


First post, by dnewhous

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Short answer: Synergi GS. Even if I were trying to use an XG soundfont with Final Fantasy VII, I'd still use this soundfont.

Now, an assessment of the competition:

Edgesounds - 24 bit GM soundfont. This thing sounds terrible. Don't consider it in your wildest dreams. They have another soundfont with an XG bank in it but the GM soundfont sounds so bad I wouldn't even consider it.

Sonivox GS 250 - Too large for older cards. The electric guitar sounds are better than the Synergi GS, but not enough better to justify the price or the huge size of the file. The classical instrument sounds are inferior!

Papelmedia GM - A good site to test out your soundfont's classical instrument sounds. The electric guitar sounds are dreadful and too loud on this soundfont, but the classical instruments are positively audiophile grade. At 260 MB this is an awfully large file for a strictly GM bank. The price is low and the Synergi soundfont is small enough that you can load this soundfont after the Synergi GS soundfont and this soundfont will override all of the GM sounds.

note: You can not load the Papelmedia GM and Sonivox 250 GS as the same time on a X-fi.

Soundfonts not tried:

E-MU Proteus 2000 from Digital Sound Factor. Supposedly a replication of what's on some old hardware. The demo sounds okay. But it isn't clear this is balanced for GS.

Big Fish Audio Soundfont Toolbox - contains a 24 MB GM bank. Product looks unremarkable.

Soundfont editing:

I do have Vienna 2.4 on my machine - but I don't see an easy way to move banks or patches from one soundfont to another. It looks like you have to extract the samples to wav and then reconstruct the polyphony in the new soundfont.

Reply 1 of 10, by gulikoza

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It is definitely possible to move patches from soundfont to soundfont with Vienna. I have done this a few years ago, I collected a bunch of free soundfonts and merged the best instruments together into my personal GM font.

http://www.si-gamer.net/gulikoza

Reply 2 of 10, by dnewhous

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gulikoza wrote:

It is definitely possible to move patches from soundfont to soundfont with Vienna. I have done this a few years ago, I collected a bunch of free soundfonts and merged the best instruments together into my personal GM font.

What's the trick? You can't copy and paste from one soundfont to another. At least not with Vienna 2.4.

Reply 3 of 10, by swaaye

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My fav soundfonts are Taiji Generation 4SE, Chorium, and SGM-180. I've tried Synergi GS and thought it was ok but not as good as the above 3 can be. I haven't tried the other ones you mention. I don't play FF7 though and as you know every game has its own unique needs. 😀

On machines with not much available RAM, I also occasionally use the 8MB Synergi free edition.

Reply 4 of 10, by aleksej

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dnewhous wrote:

Big Fish Audio Soundfont Toolbox - contains a 24 MB GM bank. Product looks unremarkable.

This one?
AFAIK, Big Fish Audio Soundfont Toolbox contains Sonido Media Monster GM 24 and 12 mb banks. Fairly unbalanced banks, imho.

Reply 5 of 10, by gerwin

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I am kinda interested in this one: Voice Crystal 4MB GM/GS

Nice to see their ties with the golden days of wavetable music, with references to Korg, Ensoniq, Gus, Turtle Beach etc. Besides what is on their official website there is not much info on their GM/GS set, and unfortunately no paypal option either.

Reply 6 of 10, by aleksej

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gerwin wrote:

I am kinda interested in this one: Voice Crystal 4MB GM/GS

Nice to see their ties with the golden days of wavetable music, with references to Korg, Ensoniq, Gus, Turtle Beach etc. Besides what is on their official website there is not much info on their GM/GS set, and unfortunately no paypal option either.

Yeah i was interested in it too. Bought it today. Well, it is same by sound in general as regular GSFULL4M, which comes with GUS PnP (from the same hand), ofcourse little retuned, renewed (v4). Has quite good clear sound, a good choice for any GUS fan at least in nostalgic purposes. 😀

Reply 7 of 10, by gerwin

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aleksej wrote:

Yeah i was interested in it too. Bought it today. Well, it is same by sound in general as regular GSFULL4M, which comes with GUS PnP (from the same hand), ofcourse little retuned, renewed (v4). Has quite good clear sound, a good choice for any GUS fan at least in nostalgic purposes. 😀

This soundfont is also in my possession since a week or two. The drums are very good. The overall balance is very similar to the soundcanvas (which should be a good thing, yet also makes things a bit boring).

I did not know these version 3.0 patchsets such as GSFULL4M were provided as software. My Turtle Beach Rio is also related to this soundfont, but it has version 2.0. It is listed as the Monterey. For Dos it is nice to have it in the convenient form of Midi Daughterboard.

(edit: small typo)

Last edited by gerwin on 2009-10-28, 11:34. Edited 1 time in total.

--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul

Reply 8 of 10, by aleksej

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gerwin wrote:

For Dos it is nice to have it in the convenient form of Midi Daughterboard.

There is fantastically uneffective (in their total cost) solution for it, he-he 😀
http://www.smproaudio.com/produkte/v-machines/v-machine.html
Hardware VST plug-in player + some kind of VST soundfont plug-in + soundfont.
How about Native Instruments Bandstand 3GB(!) GM bank in DOS? 😉
http://www.native-instruments.com/#/en/produc … ucer/bandstand/

Reply 9 of 10, by gerwin

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aleksej wrote:
There is fantastically uneffective (in their total cost) solution for it, he-he :) http://www.smproaudio.com/produkte/v-machines […]
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There is fantastically uneffective (in their total cost) solution for it, he-he 😀
http://www.smproaudio.com/produkte/v-machines/v-machine.html
Hardware VST plug-in player + some kind of VST soundfont plug-in + soundfont.
How about Native Instruments Bandstand 3GB(!) GM bank in DOS? 😉
http://www.native-instruments.com/#/en/produc … ucer/bandstand/

Interesting hardware! but as you said; for that money you can buy a normal PC and run the VST host on that. Earlier on I was also thinking about a mini PC for use as a software synthesizer host and such. The earlier Atom Mini-ITX boards will probably get cheaper since the release of the NVidia ION... 🙄 The idea is nice, but I will leave it at that for now.

--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul

Reply 10 of 10, by dnewhous

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The Synergi soundfont is still available commercially here http://samples-shop.com/sf2-native/soundfonts … ol2-p-1551.html.

The other places to get commercial soundfonts are Edgesounds, and GoldMIDIsf2. They claim to have a soundfont based on the Roland SC88Pro, but it is not for sale.

The timing on Soniqbear is messed up! The drums are hitting before their time in the mid file. I have better luck with FF8.sf2, which I made with Awave studio.

Daniel L Newhouse