Free Quality SoundFonts (Sf2) | Hacker News Reader

Free Quality SoundFonts (Sf2)

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79 pointshggh12 comments

As an (extremely) amateur musician I've had hours of fun with free soundfonts like these and the open source LMMS[0], which was nice and familiar to me since I'd played with pirated copies of FruityLoops (now FL Studio) as a teenager.

[0] https://lmms.io/

Good resource. Some of the piano SoundFonts here are available in https://chiptune.app (Yamaha Grand Lite 1.1, Chateau Grand Lite 1.0, Abbey Steinway D 1.9, Steinway Grand 1.0). Play a MIDI file, open Settings tab, find them at bottom of SoundFont menu. (You can also drag-and-drop SF2 files.)

For those who want to broaden their options and are not really constrained to only using SF2, the SFZ format has a similar purpose and there are many free instruments as they are easy to create (a text markup referring to the, typically WAV, audio files as is). Plogue sforzando [0] (freeware) is my favorite plugin for SFZ files. I learned about SFZ via an orchestra set called the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra [1,2].

[0] https://www.plogue.com/products/sforzando.html

[1] https://sso.mattiaswestlund.net/

[2] https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/81?class=related-lin...

Sweet! I built a little plug-and-play digital MIDI controller and published it with the Salamander Grand Piano samples, so I could use any smart phone to have MIDI playback. I had always planned on grabbing more samples but I did everything from "scratch" (webaudio, but no audio lib), so I was just taking shots in the dark about what downsampling I could do while retaining quality (you can see, on the website, I missed the mark; the samples are degraded: [0]).

Hopefully, I can use these free sound fonts - at the very least - as a basis for sound sample quality. But it looks like I could probably just add sf2 and sfz support to my controller, which would open up all of these instruments for me. That's a pretty exciting goal!

Thanks for sharing!

[0] https://www.midi-speaker.com

Is anyone aware of open source piano sound synthesis software? Something like Pianoteq, but open?

https://github.com/michele-perrone/OpenPiano

I don't think there are any useful plugin builds of it, though, even though it's built on Juce

Somewhat discouraging demo / issue: https://github.com/michele-perrone/OpenPiano/issues/3

The readme make it clear it's very much work in progress:

Right now, Open Piano sounds like a strangely out of tune piano with no soundboard and only one string per note.

> work in progress

In the euphemistic sense. In the literal sense, there are no commits for over a year.

I searched quite a bit a few month back and coulsn't find anything. I ended up buying a Pianoteq licence, having native Linux support convinced me.

If you mean physically modeled piano synthesis, then I'm unaware, but also very interested to know

SBAWE32 + YAMAHA XG-50 was the burner at that time for me.

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