Soundfont Snafus


Jul 10 2009

I wanted to wait until after our move to purchase a drumline soundfont (or at least a set of samples so I can create my own soundfont). Once we made it to Portland I got a bit impatient and purchased the Digital Drumtech Percussion and Pit soundfonts for $29.99 (they're still running the special). I saw that it was for Windows, but I figured it was a zip file containing samples or an SF2 file. I was wrong. It comes in an exe that does a registry tweak to permit loading their large soundfont. And no refunds. Oh well. It was only $30 and maybe some day I'll run the installation on a windows machine and see what I can use from my purchase.

The bigger disappointment is that their license prohibits commercial use of the library. What?! Yeah, I should have read their Terms & Conditions more closely. Luckily last night I found a soundfont that sounds good enough for now. Get it here (bottom of the page).

I had also looked at the Tonehammer Marching Band / Drum Corps library, but after emailing the company I found out the library does NOT include separate samples of tenor drums. Luckily I didn't purchase that library in haste. It would have been useless to me.

So last night I started messing with lilypond more. Lilypond is the notation software I'm planning to use for composition. It also outputs scores as MIDI files, and I think I ran across some holes in lilypond's midi output. Snare drum accents aren't working, and every flam after the first in a piece gets omitted altogether. This is probably a good time for me to dive into the code and see if I can help out, especially since I hope to use the open source project in a commercial setting.

 
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