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upsetting all the people who like my general midi content by informing them i am not particularly fond of soundfonts

someday i will rant about this. today is not that day. suffice to say that while CREATIVE® SoundFont® technology is okay at General MIDI and offers some fun creative possibilities, it was never good at GM extensions like Roland's GS and Yamaha's XG, and i love those, so i hate it

that's not an ironic use of the trademark symbol btw. SoundFont® is a registered trademark of Creative Technology. and if you're thinking “hey aren't they the company notable for making sound cards in the 1990's” that's because, yes, this is ancient and obsolete technology

unfortunately (and this is where i go a little nuclear) CREATIVE® SoundFont® was never particularly good. why are we still using this. why has the name become quasi-genericised. surely there are better ways to do libraries of sampled instruments.

god i guess one way to explain it is that it's like if you were really into the moog or something and then people are like “oh yeah i love that! i have a moog synthesiser sample library that all my gamer friends tell me sounds the most realistic”. it's not the same instrument

i can respect a sample library as a legitimate kind of “instrument” in its own right but…

i think the gimmick of “here's a General MIDI sound set that resembles the instrument samples from Super Mario 64's soundtrack” is kinda neat though i suppose. that's a weird way to use CREATIVE® SoundFont® technology but it's a fun one at least

i am a single issue voter in this election and my single issue is that nobody understands general midi. not satisfied with the candidates' answers on this matter

“vice president harris what do you think of the fact that nobody knows what a variation effect is these days. how do you feel about amp simulation”

oops i guess this did turn into a rant. if you want suggestions for what to use instead, well:

• hardware: Roland Sound Canvas, Yamaha MU, or similar
• software: Roland Sound Canvas VA (VST), Yamaha S-YXG50, Nuked SC-55

all more powerful than any soundfont can ever be

specifically i recommend these if you want accurate playback of 1990's General MIDI/Roland GS/Yamaha XG music or if you want to try to write music for this exciting world that once was. if you just want a way to put 128 instrument samples in a file, SoundFont® is… fine i guess

but it's frustrating because oh my god the most widely known and used implementations of General MIDI are really… lowest common denominator. it's like the poster child for a standard that's a victim of its own success

oh also there's just the thing that Roland and Yamaha knew what they were doing and their sound sets were balanced and versatile. your average SoundFont® file is not

becoming the most annoying girl in the world because i will always refer to them as CREATIVE® SoundFont® files from now on

@hikari as someone with experience messing with incredibly fucky implementations and extensions of midi & soundfonts, i feel seen.

@hikari I didn't know I needed to read a rant about MIDI and SoundFonts today but I absolutely did

@hikari oh fwiw like, definitely the most annoying thing for me about soundfonts is how it's just became a word that means "using the sound from a specific thing that already exists", like i get comments on youtube videos i did years ago where people are asking me for the soundfont i used, or who made it, can they have it. and i'm like?? i just extracted the sounds myself? they were adpcm and now they're wav files? i set loops and envelopes in a sampler VST?

@hikari i guess there's this whole drag-and-drop-a-midi-file-into-a-soundfont-player-and-upload-it-to-youtube culture which i only occasionally catch a glimpse of but it's like one of the main ways that people engage with video game music

@jk the process of creating a CREATIVE® SoundFont® file is technically, like, setting loops and envelopes in a sampler (i've done it!), but you're limiting yourself to the specific properties that this crusty old format allows. and then, well, as you're getting at, people seem to imagine that CREATIVE® SoundFont® files just pop out of the ether with no creative effort, as if all music was written for them, which is bizarre

@hikari i made a bunch of soundfonts quite a long time ago, specifically of sounds from a yamaha pss-6, which doesn't really have any features it can't reproduce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMfbMVjM0gA
the thing is, i only really chose it because it was the only self-contained, well-supported single-file sample library i could think of at the time. then i spent a while using sfz, but it wasn't single-file, and kontakt, but i've never liked the software that much. nowadays i largely use TAL-Sampler which i love

@hikari god am I glad Nuked SC-55 exists now.

@marisadoom we are truly blessed!!!! it is a wonderful project

@hikari between that and the ADLMIDI project I have two wonderful ways to enjoy midi music now.

@hikari i do not trust any file format whose data specification includes a 'hydra' in it

@hikari while on the original ROMs topic, it's amusing how even the Soundfonts® that sound better are those used specifically for a certain composition. Which means the best ones are the ones shipped with the AWE32/64 or their ROM dump because that's what the music composers at the time were targeting. Which makes it ludicrous to play DOOM with a 200 megabyte Soundfont® loaded!

@hikari oh well, on a second thought, I'm not sure DOOM is the best example, I think it's music was OPL3? I just wanted a 90s game example everybody knows. Maybe Wing Commander III, or Tie Fighter are better examples.

@aperezdc DOOM had an OPL2 soundtrack and a General MIDI soundtrack, the latter was written for the Sound Canvas SC-55

@hikari TIL, and thanks for the correction. I immediately had the feeling after posting that Doom was not a good example because it was released before the AWE32 came out

@aperezdc @hikari and thats not even getting into the hell that is midi/soundfont implementations that use nonstandard instrumentation and then listening to people whine and complain when they try to play that midi back using a different soundfont and wonder why it sounds like ass.

(and don't even get me started on the nightmare that is the more obscure midi + fm synth formats.)