The search continues for a perfect FREE piano SoundFont
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For a while I’ve been googling for a perfect FREE piano SoundFont. As parsimonious as I am, I wan’t to believe that I can acquire a very nice sounding piano SoundFont without giving up a single penny. Sure there are a lot of sites that claims to offer the best sound but I just don’t want to waste money then end up dissatisfied with my purchase.
My effort paid off when I came across gpo-concert-steinway-ver2.sf2, a very nice sounding soundfont downloadable from this site: http://www.sf2midi.com/
I immediately rendered some piano MIDIs using SynthFont. The result is really amazing! It made a flimsy sounding MIDI file sound as if it is being played on a real concert grand. It has several velocity layers. If I am not mistaken, about 7. The creator of this soundfont even went to the extent of emulating string harmonics which made it sound even more realistic.
There are just a couple of downsides (but I think are tolerable). After a natural decay of about 8 - 10 seconds, you will hear a noticeable loop. In fact, the sound does not decay if you don’t release the key or the damper pedal (unlike in a real piano). So a lot of pedal releasing skills is needed to use this soundfont effectively. I think these kinds of problems are editable using a soundfont editing tool but I have yet to explore this area. Another problem I encountered is I cannot seem to reproduce the fortissimo velocity layers on live performances. If I hit on the key very hard, all I get is a muffled sound. I can’t figure out if it is a problem on my controller (a CASIO CTK-800), or on my soundfont player (VSampler 3).
What I can do now is just sequence my song, then render it with SynthFont. And the results are really outstanding.
Are you sure that this is not a cracked version of the Garritan Steinway? The various downsides you mentioned are not present in the original version.
Comment by Rob Weber | February 27, 2009
It turned out the problem is in VSampler 3. I imported the soundfont to VSampler and somehow, it did not faithfully converted all the properties of the said soundfont, hence, the downsides mentioned. I tried opening the soundfont in synthfont and it now works perfectly.
Comment by midiman | March 2, 2009