sfArk Conversion

• Jan 22, 2017 - 19:51

In the Soundfonts section of the Handbook, the links provided for converting sfArk files to sf2 appear not to work. Anyone know of a solution? Thank you.


Comments

In reply to by Shoichi

Nope, tried that. Melody is dead and deprecated. The cloud convert seems to go into an endless loop that never resolves. Dead ends but thanks.

Maybe it's just a situation where "you can't get there from here" :-) Too bad because I found what sounds like a great jazz guitar font when heard in the MP3 or .wav demos on www.rhejazzpage.de but it's in sfArk format.

In reply to by Shoichi

It turns out that utility is also available in Linux Mint 18 repository. I installed it using Software Manager, which says it is now installed, but it's nowhere to be found in order for me to use it. Doesn't show up anywhere in the Menu in Mint. I have a question posted in Linuxquestions.org to see if I can figure out how to find and run it.

In reply to by juniorjet

You wrote you've installed it from Mint repository.

Maybe you could run "find *sfark*" again (with wildcards) to see, if it is installed somewhere.

Other idea (I don't have Mint): Shows the software manager details to installed packages, where the files are placed?

In reply to by juniorjet

Why use ./ for an apt installed program? Isn't that for running a script or executable within the current working directory? Try it without the ./ If that doesn't work, you can always use Wine to run the windows executable provided on melodymachine's site.
 
Wine is probably already installed on your system. If not, 'sudo apt-get install wine' and then download the "old" windows binary currently located at (http://melodymachine.com/sites/melodymachine.com/files/sfark_setup.exe), cd into the download directory, and then run $wine sfark_setup.exe. If the program doesn't run after the setup, then locate it in your wine directory. Odds are it will be ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/sfArk. Go there and run $wine sfArk.exe With the Windows gui version you just File->Open the .sfark file and then press the "start" button and it will uncompress into the same directory the sfark file is located. Has worked for me. Good luck.

In reply to by worldwideweary

Success and partial success. You were right about the linux command line. when I dropped the ./ the utility ran fine but returned a message that it couldn't open the source file I had given it. I double checked and couldn't find an error in the file name so I have no idea what that was about.

However, I happen to have a trial copy of the proprietary souped up version of WINE on my computer so used that to uncompress the win .exe version. Worked fine and got the .sf2 file loaded into MuseScore.

And after all that, this supposed super duper whiz bang Gibson L5 jazzguitar sound is just so so and still very midi sounding. Oh well.

Thanks for your help with this.

I've just made a few conversions from sfArk files taken from thejazzpage.de. I used the sfArk SoundFont compression app from melodymachine. The converted sf2 files worked just fine in the MuseScore sinthesizer.
They also opened without problems in the Viena Soundfont editor (NOT the Vienna - two n's, from Creative Labs).

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