Re: Desperate cry!
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Posted by Jeremy Dimmick on August 13, 2001 at 20:44:49:
In Reply to: Desperate cry! posted by Dijk on August 13, 2001 at 15:37:46:
[snip]
: I have a Creative Soundblaster 1024 Live! Platinum 5.1. When I press a key on the Yamaha, I hear a sound via the speakers that are connected to my computer. So far everything is all right. What I also can do is change these sounds by the computer. But they all sounds sound "plastic", I mean not realistic. Just like my old keyboard, actually.
: Why is this, isn't my soundcard good enough?
The thing about the Live is that the quality of the sound you get is entirely dependent on the soundfonts you use. The big attraction with the Live is the ease with which you can swap in and out different instruments, but the ones that are loaded by default when LiveWare is installed are indeed very poor.
Firstly, make sure you're using the soundfont-capable synths for your MIDI output. In Control Panel, open Multimedia and look at the MIDI tab. You'll see several options; pick A: SB Live! MIDI synth (in some versions of LiveWare this is labelled MIDI for SB Live! or someting like that.) The 'B' synth, by the way, is identical and gives you an extra 16 MIDI channels. Don't use "Creative S/W Synth", which is very low quality.
Next, run AudioHQ and choose Soundfont. Probably, either the 2Mb or 4Mb General MIDI synth will be loaded. Unload it, and instead load into bank 000 the 8Mb one (it's on the driver CD, I forget the exact file name but it begins with '8' and has the extension .sf2.
You should notice a big difference at once - but you can do still better, so long as you have plenty of system RAM, by downloading one of the large, custom-made banks from sites such as http://www.hammersound.net - e.g. General User 1.3, or All-In-One. And you're not limited to General MIDI banks - you can mix and match individual instruments to your liking.
For further information, there's some useful tips at Hybrid (http://home.graffiti.net/hybrid-sf/), which is a big soundfont archive. There's also a newsgroup for soundfont-related discussions: silco.hammersound.soundfonts
Hope that helps you find your way.
- Re: Desperate cry! Dijk 8/14/2001
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- Re: Desperate cry! Jeremy Dimmick 8/15/2001
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- Re: Desperate cry! Jeremy Dimmick 8/15/2001
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