Add a page for recommended sound fonts

[mateofio]

Start collecting information about good and usable sound fonts. Make a dedicated page for this on the website to help users.

Quick draft notes here:

SoundFont files

Windows MIDI playback uses a DirectMusic component which uses a sound font wavetable bank licensed by Roland (some stripped down ~3 MB Sound Canvas version with GM/GS support) available in a file called GM.DLS, which was being distributed by DirectX and bundled by modern Windows. However, the file includes a txt file which contains a license that explicitly disallows using it on non-Windows operating systems, so consider this if you use it somewhere else at your risk if you want the original music experience out there.

SoundFont suggestions

Soundfonts out there were quite popular between 90s and 2000s, but unfortunately there are lots of sound rips from commercial products created by users, so be warned where the origin is dubious.

Musical Artifacts website has a lot of community provided SoundFont downloads with the "sf2" filter. It features a licensing "gray area" warning when content licensing is not clear, which is cool, apart of other better, classified licenses. But keep in mind the alleged license is still provided by the uploader, so they could be wrong (and there is a high chance a lot of them are!).

There are other places with soundfonts, but licensing and origin of files is not clear or simply not provided, so can't recommend them, including some Internet Archive folders.

Hint: in this site and some others, scc1t2.sf2 and other ~3 MB Roland based sound fonts are likely direct GM.DLS conversions made with Awave Studio or similar software.

For a chiptune-style soundfont GXSCC GM is just 128 KB, so it also suits for memory constrained environments. Note: it is not sure if these samples are directly ripped from a proprietary soundfont from Gashisoft GXSCC (if any) or just carefully created from sample primitives.

Safer (in the legal way) soundfonts, it is suggested audited soundfonts accepted in GNU/Linux distributions, which have stricter requirements, where the content source license should be proven as a free/libre license, no grey areas are allowed. Accepted soundfonts in large well known distros with strict guidelines (Debian, Fedora) are "Fluid" R3 GM/GS and "PersonalCopy" Lite soundfonts.

EasyRPG Player SoundFont support

Currently, EasyRPG Player allows MIDI playback with a user provided soundfont file. The file is expected to be called easyrpg.soundfont, so you can get a sf2 (or sf3 file, if fluidsynth/fluidlite is built with sf3 support), and rename it, then place the file in the same directory where the game executable is located.

[calthax]

Here's a few links to some soundfonts https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/724 https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts?formats=sf2&license=gpl https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts?tags=open+source https://www.awm.jp/~yoya/js/sf2.js/sample/ https://schristiancollins.com/generaluser.php https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/2993 https://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/virtualmidisynth https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/1229 https://archive.org/download/soundfonts_201910 https://hirotaka2014.sakura.ne.jp/mh0406/music/sf_comp/ http://ntonyx.com/05_sf_01.html#008 https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/2592 https://sites.google.com/site/soundfonts4u/ https://trisamples.com/free-soundfonts/ https://cymatics.fm/blogs/production/soundfonts https://archive.org/details/dawnsgmgs2 https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1rCL1lU-Q5P8g55PbfPRNggRO-OedAeH9?pli=1 https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/1234 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDAQ7p7vm8ylmW5xYo629eQ https://youtu.be/SSPgcTTfUxs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eabyjYh4cc https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/118TpIuJPrvNcNNIYs-kXb-jcwQYeSLEI http://midi.xproot.pw/mirror/soundfonts/FatBoy-0.790.7z https://web.archive.org/web/20220124174052/https://fatboy.site/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz8opYYsl2HJbP-OkdhNMcw http://midi.xproot.pw/mirror/soundfonts/UHD3.7z https://web.archive.org/web/20180603220558/https://pub.dotbalm.org/misc/UHD3.7z https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZjCma3GKtfYt-GDJabfbzA/about http://timbrechbill.com/saxguru/Timidity.php https://sourceforge.net/p/mscore/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/mscore/share/sound/TimGM6mb.sf2?format=raw http://www.un4seen.com/download.php?extra/WeedsGM3 http://www.un4seen.com/download.php?extra/ChoriumRevA.rar http://www.mediafire.com/download/zo8l3dgf2989266/SGM-V2.01.7z http://www.arachnosoft.com/main/soundfont.php http://midkar.com/soundfonts/index.html http://www.synthfont.com/soundfonts.html https://github.com/urish/cinto/blob/master/media/FluidR3%20GM.sf2 https://gmrsf2.blogspot.com/ https://www.4shared.com/archive/q2oBM_bc/Gmr__b https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/1312 https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/9 http://www.personalcopy.com/ http://www.synthzone.com/soundfont.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20050308192630/http://bennetng.kc-studio.com/ https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/3221 https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/3234 https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/3235 https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/1169 https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1l2t_ZnUuaB8A6VPJKIq0NoFvsD6Oxbur https://archive.org/details/sfark_setup https://archive.org/details/SFPack

[peteroupc]

There are many kinds of wavetable instrument bank formats, including SoundFont 2 (.sf2), the Downloadable Sounds (.dls) standard from the MIDI Association, and the UltraSound patch format.

Microsoft DirectMusic implements the Downloadable Sounds standard and not SoundFont 2; however, DirectMusic is now an obsolete technology, it seems.

Among the challenges I make to the open-source community is a public-domain set of instrument banks for software synthesizers. Making these banks would be easier if there were a guide on producing decent-quality instrument banks from the recordings of real musical instruments (rather than copying or converting other instrument banks or recording from commercial synthesizers).