Piano sound fonts
I have been using the "Splendid Piano" sound font, but I received a recent suggestion to try out the West Coast Piano sound font for comparison. The SP sound font is stereo, the WCP is mono. Both of these sound fonts are free. I've put together a comparison between the two at these links:
http://ormusic.home.comcast.net/Seattle.mp3
http://ormusic.home.comcast.net/SeattleWCP.mp3
I interested in hearing from anyone who has other suggestions for a nice piano sound font.
Comments
Following directions I found for Sibelius (http://www.informatics-tech.com/how-to-use-soundfonts-in-sibelius.html), I installed "SFZ-player" in the plug-ins subdirectory of MuseScore. I downloaded the Campbell Harpsichord sound font to try out, but from that point on the instructions for using it in Sibelius don't match up with anything I can find in MuseScore's menus. How do you do it??
In reply to sound fonts primer, please by skaufman
http://musescore.org/en/handbook/soundfont has the instructions.
Not found by MuseScore's search engine, but a general Google search on "how to use sound fonts in musescore" found it!
duh...
In reply to Oh, here it is by skaufman
It does find it for me: how to use sound fonts in musescore. The Soundfont handbook page is the first result. Not for you?
In reply to sound fonts primer, please by skaufman
Go into MuseScore and open your synthesizer. > Display > Synthesizer. The synth panel will open up. At the bottom there's a window for "Sound Font." Click on the box to the right and your computer files will be available. Click on the sound font from your files that you want to use and then press "open." The sound font will then be in your software.
Is that what you're trying to do?
If not, sorry. hahaha.
Is seatle.mscz avaiable somewhere to test with another soundfont?
In reply to Seattle.mscz by [DELETED] 5
A copy of Seattle.mscz is available here:
http://ormusic.home.comcast.net/Seattle.mscz
If you do a comparison, can you post the mp3 somewhere so we can hear it?
For me, a good runner-up to the Splendid Piano font is the (stereo) WST25 font. The SP font has some built-in reverb that WST25 doesn't have, but otherwise WST25 sounds pretty good. Here is Seattle with the WST25 font:
http://ormusic.home.comcast.net/SeattleWST25.mp3
Because WST25 lacks reverb, the score should have been adjusted slightly to sustain in a few places for WST25 ...
In reply to Another good piano sound font by EdwardsRG
Find two more tests here : http://soundcloud.com/lasconic/sets/test-piano-soundfont
In reply to Another good piano sound font by EdwardsRG
Although WST25 is usually a good alternative to the Splendid Piano font, it sometimes just doesn't work out. In another post, I showed the audio model of "The Crave" with the SP font. It turns out that WST25 has great difficulty with the second statement of the opening strain, which is located at 0:33 to 1:00 of the audio. To use WST25 for "The Crave" would require quite a bit of fiddling with this problem strain. On the other hand, SP (probably because of its reverb) sounds acceptable without having to do additional work. Below are the links to the SP and WST versions of this tune.
http://ormusic.home.comcast.net/Crave.mp3
http://ormusic.home.comcast.net/CraveWST25.mp3