Some of you might remember the old Silverspring Soundfont. It was originally made for Heretic and Doom MIDI playback. Well it's been more or less resurrected last year, but because of a few issues work has been going on and off. This is an offshoot of the Silverspring 1.6 Soundfont (it's almost the same as the full bank) that's been tested with Descent MIDI.

It may not be as great for other games like Hexen (because of its MIDI files' low note velocity), so the final idea is to just have several Soundfont banks, each one tailored to a certain game. This is mostly based on the old Silverspring Soundfont with some new additions.

Tested with:

* Coolsoft Virtual MIDI Synth 2.8.0 — working.
* Creative Sound Blaster PCMCIA Audigy 2 ZS with Audigy Support Pack 3.8 by D. K. — not quite working. There are note dropouts on layered instruments and drums (toms won't play on Game07.mid as an example).

So it's sort of recommended for soft synth SF2 engines, but not quite yet for hardware synths. There's a warm pad that's a bit too hard on layers for a (Creative, SIGH) soundcard as an example.

New clean guitar, picked bass, acoustic bass, standard drumkit/small percussion/cymbals, agogo, woodblock, melodic tom and some other instruments. It's not quite perfect yet, but it is designed to sound as good as possible given the limitations. And yes, those are original sampled instruments made right here with some physical drums and guitars and percussive instruments. Some even have multiple velocity zones.

Download the file here: Solar Descent Bank 1.0 Alpha. Full size is 291 MBs.

Try it out and please do tell what you think.

This is more of a standalone game Soundfont bank rather than Silverspring 2 (that might show up later). It will work nicely for some other games like Doom/Doom II (try "Message for The Arch-Vile" and d_runnin.mid, d_e1m4.mid, etc.), but there are some issues with Descent II already. You can try them with Descent II (all the six MIDI files in it), pumping is an issue. Sounds good with Descent in DOSBox though.

And more than that, there's a bunch of problems with Soundfonts in general...

1. Attenuation/mixing in most Soundfont engines means things get ugly when instruments are mixed at lower volumes. Looks like this is because of 16-bit attenuation and basically bitcrushing when instruments are mixed at, say, -7 dB. Some presets sound good, others sound dull (distorted guitars are the most noticeably damaged, life sucked out of them). This means that for a Soundfont to sound good it has to be loud, with little attenuation. If you pay attention to most recent Soundfonts, they're loud. This in turn brings other problems, like clipping or more precisely limiter kicking in on most engines. Which creates pumping. This is technically nasty as it makes all MIDI files sound compressed. Try the BASSMIDI Coolsoft Virtual MIDI Synth and use its converter to render 32-bit waves, then normalise them to -0.3 dB to get a non-compressed waveform. Some files (Game17.mid, Game02.mid) will get as loud as +4, +5 dB (and have that ugly pumping in-game, though chances are it won't bother you much).

2. Layered instruments can drop notes on some (most?) Creative Soundfont drivers. Tested on Sound Blaster Audigy-2ZS PCMCIA under Windows XP SP3 with some recentish DK drivers (3.😎. That soundcard is sort of softwarish when it comes to Soundfont playback so it might (and really ought) to sound better on PCI Sound Blaster Live/Audigy cards. BASSMIDI synths are fine (hardware filters rock though compared to soft synths). There aren't that many layers (usually it's 2 layers maximum per preset), but Creative drivers are, well, Creative drivers.

3. Size might be an issue for Creative drivers, especially earlier ones on a slower PC. If you get BSODs you might even have to check the RAM chips aren't dusty (that helped on the test box here).

4. Hardware filters rule. To give you an idea the second synth bass sounds fat and strong on a real SB Live or Audigy and it mixes great, but it's somewhat floppy/dull on soft SF2 synths. On the other hand soft synths tend to be better with metallic trebley overtones.

There might be a single-layer version later on. Also a quieter version to avoid pumping. Like -10 dB quieter. Size might get trimmed especially if there are requests. As it is the clean guitar and the standard drumkit have 4 velocity zones.
There are some standalone Kontakt instruments and Soundfonts too, including an experimental little distorted guitar instrument, which you can get here.

Stuff that might change in the final 1.0 version: P. 38 - Synth Bass 1, P. 39 - Synth Bass 2, P. 27 - Clean Guitar, P. 30 - Distorted Guitar, P. 29 - Overdriven Guitar. Also possibly strings.