Another piano font

I'll try to answer your questions, but we need to recognize that Musescore is score writing, not music generation software, so this matter is a bit off topic.

“I would be interested in hearing how you went about creating the soundfont?” The Viena software has some instructions about creating a soundfont from scratch, but I found it best to try editing an existing soundfont first, just to get the hang of the software.

“Did you start by making your own recordings or pre-recorded samples?” I started with public-domain sound samples for the new soundfont. However, many of them needed extensive editing to make them conform to the sound I was looking for.

“I am wondering what you found lacking in the candidate soundfonts you tried and what types of decisions/steps were required to come up with this new one?” Almost all of the published soundfonts contain some degree of reverb (some with a lot), and I wanted a sound font without any reverb so it could be added later, if desired. (Note that the sample contains no reverb.) Also, I wanted to have a lot of “splits” on velocity so notes of different loudness really sound different. And I wanted a soundfont that retained the high frequency components of the sounds, just as if you had your head over the strings. If you consider having four velocity splits per note, that is 88*4*2 (the two for stereo), or theoretically 704 splits that have to be defined. However, many of the very high and very low notes can be defined in groups, or are satisfactory with only a couple of velocity splits. This new font is defined with about 450 splits altogether. You can see that a great deal of patience and perseverance are required to get everything ironed out. And there is the complication that Viena is 0.9 version software, so it is a little buggy. So we are talking about a task that involves many, many hours.