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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…
people will pour great amounts of effort into making the “best” SC-55-soundalike CREATIVE® SoundFont® file and it'll take up like a hundred times more disk space than the original ROMs did and not even support adjusting the fucking filter cutoff, so it can't play electronic music
@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 