Better Choral Soundfonts For MuseScore 4?

• Jun 26, 2020 - 17:00

I know it's probably not important to you guys, maybe it is, but are there any plans to add an improved choral soundfont for MuseScore 4? The built in choral ahh's are okay at best. The tuning of the notes are wacky and the sound quality sounds washed out. I know there are other choral soundfonts out there, but most of them are pretty bad and even worse than this one in my opinion. I know this is free stuff and it isn't straightforward to make stuff like this, but I'm not expecting any $599 Spitfire Eric Whitacre Choir level of quality, just something comparable to the excellent strings revamp you guys did a little earlier. You could have the fast and swell variants and possibly even the expressive variants with cresc./decresc. if that's feasible. As a choral composer who heavily relies on listening more so than notation alone, this kind of thing is really important to me. For now, most of us choral oriented composers rely on just the piano, strings, or woodwinds to emulate the choir. The Choral Ahh's aren't cutting it. Thank you very much for reading and for your incredible work on this notation software during this unprecedented time.


Comments

In reply to by Shoichi

I've actually got the KBH choir soundfont someone mentioned in a comment there! It's pretty good but the tone is a little strident, just to be picky, and it only covers the treble side of things, no lower bass notes. Some of my compositions on my profile feature KBH choir. And I don't like the Florestan choir at all. I've searched far and wide for good choral soundfonts, even ones I could pay a few dollars for. No joy. Good choral soundfonts are DIFFICULT to find. That's why, God willing, I would like the team to possibly work on an updated, decent, in tune, choral soundfont built into the software that composers can use straight away.

In reply to by xXTacocubesXx

One thing to try is to find one of the commercial (but cheaper than 600$) choir soundfonts that are good, ideally one that’s been around for a longer time already (so the producer could milk it for money already), and ask them what it would take for them to release it under CC0. Perhaps they’d be willing to just do it (eh ok, but a man can dream), or accept a one-off payment for this. (It would affect their future ability to sell it, after all, if it’s also available freely, even if we’d not publish as-is but only integrated in MS_General. Also, some people who bought it before might feel cheated. But perhaps one would be willing to.)

If they’d be agreeing to do that for a lump sum, we could pool together, perhaps by pledging an amount, payable only if the total comes together, I heard there are systems which allow that. I’d certainly be willing to help making a HQ choir soundfont, and I bet others are too. Perhaps MS/UG would even join in.

And perhaps s.chriscollins could even “pimp” the soundfont afterwards to make it even better, add expressive variants, etc.…

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