Improving Soundfont Handling

• Jun 29, 2017 - 17:46

I hope you don't mind, but I have some comments on how multiple sound fonts work in 2.
First off, well done, this is an important feature and it already works very well.
However I believe there are some things which could be noticeably improved:
1) If you have multiple fonts loaded, it's hard to find what you want in the mixer, especially if the instruments in different fonts have similar (or indeed the same) names. I think this would be easier to use if there were two drop-downs per instrument: with the first selecting the font, and the second the preset.
2) If multiple fonts are loaded in the synthesizer and these both use the same bank, then it seems that one font will overwrite the other. I realize this emulates what soundfont-aware hardware does, but many software players will allow you to play sounds from different fonts even if they happen to use the same bank (or indeed preset). IMO this is a far superior way to go.
3) If I save a file which uses sounds from some non-default soundfont, then that font doesn't get automatically loaded in order to facilitate playback even though the font file is in the "sounds" folder. IMO it would be a lot less annoying if this could happen: again SynthFont will do this for MIDI files so there's clearly no technical impediment.
4) Relating to (3), why should sound fonts have to be explicitly loaded in the synthesizer anyway? Why not just make available everything in the "sounds" folder? This would no doubt depend on (1) and (2).
Many thanks for considering my musings, and please do let me know if there's anything I can test.


Comments

1) is a great idea IMHO.

As far a 4) is concerned. Perhaps listing every sound font in the soundfont folder and only loading those being used would be a good way to hand it.

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.