How to know which soundfont instrument is being used by Musescore instruments?
Hi all,
MuseScore newbie here :)
First of all, I've been using MuseScore the first time for 1 hour and I love it! Such a magnificent piece of software.
After learning the basics I've started to get familiar with the concept of soundfonts and I've installed polyphone soundfont editor in order to learn more about soundfonts. After creating a very simple one that contains couple instruments and trying to use them in musescore I've realized in the Mixer you're able to pick up the soundfont file but there isn't an obvious way to assign the instrument I want
After searching through the forums for a while I've understood this was supported in previous musescore versions <=3.x but in the current 4.1.x versions is currently unsupported (as far as I know). I've seen some threads that would recommend installing sforzando vst but after doing that I wasn't able to select my instruments easily so I just ended up uninstalling it.
So now I'm taking 1 step back and I'd like to understand the basics first, that means, I'd like to understand first how musescore is binding a particular instrument to a soundfont instrument. If there is an easy way to know which instrument is bound behind the curtains that'd allow me to tweak certain instruments to fit my needs.
Could anyone please explain how this works behind the curtains?
Also, does anyone know if a more user-friendly way to select instruments from a given soundfont will be added in future musescore releases? I mean, what was the reason this feature was removed in the first place? As a newbie, this seemed like a very handy feature to have... of course, there must have been good reasons why developers got rid of it.
Thanks in advance!
Comments
Personally, I think I might spend more time getting to know MuseScore, rather than diving into the deep end right off the bat. I might create a font with one instrument. If I have done that correctly, I would put that sf2 font in the Sound Font folder within MU4 (in Documents in Windows). Then create a score using that instrument. Open the mixer. Scroll over and select the down arrow next to the instrument name. Scroll down to and select my font. If I made the font properly, I will hear it during playback.
As yet, in the case of a multi instrument sf2 font, you can't assign instruments from the mixer. I think that if you set up you score with the exact same names as your font, when you set your font in the mixer, it should distribute the sounds. For example, if your font has has a Bb Trumpet, and your score says simply Trumpet, it might not work.
Good luck.
In reply to Personally, I think I might… by bobjp
bobjp's suggestion is helpful, taking smaller steps prevents frustration.
![bankandprogramnumber.PNG]( "bankandprogramnumber.PNG")
see also
Soundfont, MIDI velocity and instruments.xml (ms3)
open and study your ms4 MuseScore\instruments\instruments.xml
bank and program numbers of MSBasic see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SwqZb8lq5rfv5regPSA10drWjUAoi65… (this link is also written in that xml)
In reply to bobjp's suggestion is… by msfp
musescore focuses on providing notation function rather than audio creation, the essential way to add instrument all users should know is pressing keyboard i key:
ms3 Create a new score
ms4 Setting up your score
> re: mixer and future
ms4 revamp the audio creation mechanism from the ground up is probably why. also see MuseScore 3 features not implemented in MuseScore 4
Welcome aboard... you wrote:
...I've understood this was supported in previous musescore versions...
To obtain the (previous) functionality of being able to select/change instrument "sounds" from within the mixer, see:
https://community.masteringmusescore.com/c/resources/ms-basic-individua…
to download what is essentially the MuseScore 3 soundfont split into individual files for each instrument sound, individually selectable from within MuseScore 4's mixer.
Note:
Changing a "sound" in the mixer is different from changing an "instrument" in the score. When a sound is changed in the mixer, the score is unaffected. For example, in a guitar score, when changing the mixer sound from guitar to piano, the score notation will still read as guitar, but sound as piano.
On the other hand, changing the "instrument" in the score itself may affect the score display (e.g., if the change is to a transposing instrument) in addition to what "sound" is assigned in the mixer.
Also see:
https://musescore.org/en/handbook/4/soundfonts#selectionworkarounds
Hi guys, first of all, thanks for all responses and advices, I'll make sure to go through all that material to learn more about the basics. In the meantime I've seen a very interesting related thread https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/issues/17233 , it seems they've already designed in figma how the future UX will look and I like it, that'd be really intuitive way to pick up instruments.
In the meantime, I've tried to make sense out of the MuseScore4/instruments/instruments.xml and I've created a little script to group all instruments by their channel's program
I can see for some reason there are a lot of instruments that are not mapped to any particular program (i've used program=-1 here) and then you can see there are few instruments mapped to the same program.
Now, I still need to understand how this concept of program relates to the internals of soundfont files...