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I should probably write a blog post about Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth: where it came from, how it compares (unfavourably) to basically any hardware synth, why it sounds bad, how it could sound better if you use it right…

@hikari its abuse in the demoscene would also be a cool angle to cover

@gsuberland god yeah. i'm not familiar enough with that genre but i listen to the works of https://twitter.com/HueArme sometimes, which are simply incredible

@hikari I can put you in touch with some scene musicians if you want the skinny on how they generally abuse it? the general vibe is that they tend to load the gm.dls soundfont and manually parse it to use it as a wavetable.

a good open source example would be WaveSabre (a demoscene audio engine with VST frontends), which includes an instrument called "Adultery" ('cos it's cheating! :D) which uses the GmDls trick:

https://github.com/logicomacorp/WaveSabre/blob/master/WaveSabreCore/src/Adultery.cpp

@hikari yeah. and the really fun uses are the ones where you can't tell it's gm.dls under the hood, 'cos it's been chopped and processed into a much more novel sound, or the original sample has been turned into short sample arrays that get indexed by automation in a wavetable synth (like how most dubstep growls are made)

iirc for some parties/compos they delete gm.dls from the machine to prevent its use, but that bit of compo-rule history is a bit before my time