They usually follow the General Midi (GM) format, which has a Piano as preset 0, right through to a Gunshot on preset 127. They are arranged in banks of 128 sounds – 0 to 127.
They can be played from your computer keyboard (depending on the software you use) or by a midi keyboard or even a midi drum controller if you have one. It’s probably best to think of these as a sound library, arranged into specific folders by instrument. What is a Soundfont?Ī soundfont is a collection of sounds or audio samples that have been arranged to be played back by a computer’s sound card. The correct question would be: Is there any soundfont based software synthesizer allowing me to load a soundfont into only one or a few selected MIDI channels? And my answer is: none that I know.Author’s note: Although this article has been written from the point of view of a keyboard player being able to play new instrument sounds on their computer and midi keyboard, it also applies to drum sounds playable in midi.
Please see the manual ( ) for more information, or the corresponding documentation of the other programs.Ĭan fonts be individually loaded into individual MIDI channels? Using the command line fluidsynth program, the shell command "inst" displays the list of instruments defined by the soundfont. How do I distinguish between a single instrument font vs the whole bank font? Each one has a mechanism to load soundfonts and display the instruments defined by the file.
Other software synthesizers using soundfonts are VirtualMIDISynth( ) for Windows, and SimpleSynth( ) for macOS. This synth uses SF2 files and can be also used directly from the command line, or from a GUI wrapper like Qsynth( ). VLC is a player, that uses FluidSynth ( ) as a synthesizer when you load and play a MIDI file into VLC. Soundfonts can be loaded only into some software synthesizers that support soundfonts: files with the SF2 or DLS extensions.
Otherwise, more details of what you're actually doing. If the default instrument for each channel is piano, and you don't set another instrument for each channel, then each channel will play piano. If you play every track to the same channel, and that channel is set to, say, piano, then everything will come out as piano. I don't know what the defaults of your setup are, but you neeed to treat the Virtual Synth system just like a real synth, it needs telling which instrument is selected on each channel.
This is playing midi files, where the midi file contains the usual PC (Program Change) instruction to set a specific Channel to a specific instrument. I just installed things and it all worked. My use of SynthFont (software/midi player) with the 'Timbres of Heaven' SF font file has worked fine, no problems, and sounds great. I've been using vintage equipment for a lot of years, and have recently started using something more modern on my XP machine.