Descriptions of soundfonts?
Where can I find descriptions of the sounds in particular soundfonts?
For example, let's say that I wanted an electric guitar sound with distortion, or a saxophone that sounds more like a honk, or machine-like sounds to replace conventional instruments, or . . . ?
Somebody is going to say: It's best if you listen to the soundfonts instead of reading about them. I agree. But a brief written description can ease the process, especially if some soundfont files are unstable or worse.
Do written descriptions exist anywhere?
Thank you!
Ted Shoemaker
Comments
Most soundfonts that you might want to use with MuseScore use a standard called General MIDI. Do a search on that term and you should find a list of the standard sounds and GM-compatible soundfont would be expected to provide. This includes a distorted guitar sound, but not any special "honk" variation on a saxophone. You'd need a special-purpose non-GM saxophone soundfont for that, and presumably that soundfont would provide its own documentation.
Marc Sabatella is correct, most Soundfonts that you would be using with MuseScore are General Midi and doing a search on that will only tell you which instrument sound is in each bank. Each soundfont is different, so you would have to listen to multiple soundfonts until you found the right "honk" sound in the saxophone, for example. However, if that same soundfont does not match the guitar sound that you want than either your out of luck or you could get a soundfont editor to edit together multiple soundfonts into a custom one.
Some Soundfonts have either a text file with some description or a description if that you can read in a soundfont editor like Viena or Polyphone; However, not all do.
Here is the Wikipedia article on General Midi:
//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_MIDI
I hope this helps.