Re: Desperate cry!
[ Follow Ups ] [ The MIDIWORLD Forum ]
Posted by Jeremy Dimmick on August 15, 2001 at 11:12:36:
In Reply to: Re: Desperate cry! posted by Dijk on August 14, 2001 at 22:03:36:
This is a format for MIDI instruments using samples, created by E-mu and used by all modern Creative Labs soundcards and some others. A useful source of technical info on the format is http://www.soundfont.com, which is E-mu's site (they sell commercial ones there too).
The easiest way to see how one is put together is to download the free soundfont editing package, Vienna 2.3, from http://www.soundblaster.com/goodies/
Open any .sf2 file in it and you'll see a pool of audio samples, which are referenced by the 'instrument' level, which determines what sample is played where & how, and 'presets' which assign the playback of the instruments to MIDI patch numbers and allow for some high-level tweaking.
Incidentally, if you start downloading soundfonts, you'll soon find that they're often compressed using special archiving software that gives better compression rations than .zip or .rar. The two you'll meets are .sfpack and .sfArk, and here are their homepages:
http://www.megota.com/ (SFPack)
http://www.melodymachine.com/ (sfArk)