Re: [fluid-dev] Papelmedia closing down soon

[Crypto]

On Sunday 05 April 2009 at 18:27:36 Julien Claassen wrote:
> Hey Crypto!
>    I just listened to all the demos from the site. I must admit, I'm
> disappointed. After the advertisement on their website I expected more. I
> partly know better sounds in SF2 format, even in the free domain. Partly
> they get close to the quality of my Roland XP, but mostly they stay below
> that level of quality. I read something about 2GB and something about 1.2GB
> of material. But frankly, I didn't see why they need so much storage. It
> does sound harsh, when I read the criticism. OK: I guess in comparison to
> fluid Revision 3 and the like, they have a slightly better and most
> important constant quality. But they can't compare to what's available in
> GigaSampler format and not even to the most popular synths. I thought they
> would beat the hardware synth, with the advantage of sheer
> sampling-accuracy, which they can do with computer based sound formats.
>    Still if you don't have a hardware synth or have to rely on freely
> available soundfonts, this opportunity might be a real bargain!
>    Kindest regards
>          Julien

Julien,

thx for your reply!

Actually, I am not too happy with the sounds myself either and I wanted to 
find out if this is only me who has strange ears or my synth is garbled...

What I would like to do is do some live playing without any prerecorded stuff, 
and because I use linux there does not seem to be too much available for 
really good sounds. It is all depending on SF2 sound quality, so it seems.

I only have fluidsynth for playing sounds, I do not have any hardware synths.

Loading the large SF2 file of 1.2GB for a start required me to update RAM in 
my notebook so I could load it.

At the moment I have not yet tried all sounds in detail. But I can say that 
indeed some free SF2 files sound better than this in some point.

It is a tedious task to find the sounds that really sound nice, in any sound 
collection. I have been disappointed by larger SF2 files that could have 
sounded better, while smaller ones had really great sounds in them.

From what I know there is an update coming up for fluidsynth somewhen that has 
some bugs fixed and support for other sound file types. Does it also have its 
sound engine overworked? I have found that with some sounds I get sound 
artifacts which I cannot resolve what causes them. This happens especially 
with guitar sounds. So I think we need somewhere to rate SF2 files (Hammer 
website used to have this, but it is no longer available and there have not 
been any updates for a long time).

Kind regards,
Crypto.