Collegium Musicum MIDI: Baroque Instrument Library for MuseScore

I have in my possession a collection of some period instruments I used to render MIDI playback on MuseScore. Having now been exhausted with early music and historically “informed” performance, I wish to move on with more important matters, but not without first making these instruments available to those who wish to make use of them. Generally speaking, this collection is suitable for the repertoire of the late Renaissance, Baroque, Galant, and early Classical periods (c. 1560-c. 1780), as well as original compositions in the same idiom. Many of these samples are of genuine period instruments from the Bate Collection of Oxford University and edited and re-tuned via Polyphone. Admittedly, some of these samples are still very unstable, out-of-tune and uneven, so be warned. As I had been sitting on releasing this collection before MuseScore’s most recent update, which currently does not give one the option to choose between presets of a single SoundFont. My recommendation for the time being is either to use either a VST to load the presets or to isolate the desired instruments for a single score into temporary files via Polyphone (in which case the preset number must be reset to “0”, or else it won’t play). Understand also, that these samples are inferior to MuseSounds on account of the limited dynamic expression of these instruments, winds and strings especially. I am also calling on other people in the MuseScore community to share their period instrument samples if they have any.

This free collection is permanently available for download via MusicalArtifacts: https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/2759