Best soundfont for non-iwad midis?

[invictius]

Weedsgm3 may sound great for doom midis, but when people put... let's just say, unconventional... midis in their pwads (more noticeable in the 90's I guess) it doesn't size up to the sgm3 soundfont I use. I tried using evanescence (the 2gb one) which would just slow down ports way too much, and a couple of the instruments just sounded really wrong.

[Tristan]

I personally consider SGM 2.01 + the drums from here to be the best sound you can get for MIDIs in-game.

[Graf Zahl]

For non-Doom MIDIs I still prefer Timidity++ with EAWPats, for the small number of MIDIs that don't sound right with it, Windows's GM.DLS is normally good enough.

For Doom's original music I still haven't found any soundfont that does them justice, I use some high quality OGG recordings instead.

[SyntherAugustus]

I've gotten great results from CrisisGeneralMidi3. Too bad it's a pain to download and once you do, you have to up the volume for it to be audible.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0x4cog7oqjjmpna/btsx2-01.ogg?dl=0 An example.

[Urthar]

I tend to use the Arachno Sound Font, which seems to get good enough results, but I've never really gone into any depth into exploring sounds fonts.

http://www.arachnosoft.com/main/download.php?id=soundfont

[Varis Alpha]

i just use the Microsoft synth nowadays. part of it is because BassMIDI sometimes locks up GZDoom so i have to terminate the program, and part of it is because the Microsoft synth doesn't hurt my ears and sounds better because of it. when i try to listen to MIDIs with soundfonts nowadays, it's just way too loud and noisy.

[joe-ilya]

Fluidsynth, it sounds soft, even MIDIs that are harsh, like MAP15 from HR2 sounds normal and not too heavy.

[yakfak]

I would recommended listening in the default GS synth since in most cases, the tune will have been written with that set of patches in mind. on the other hand I totally sympathize with anyone who wants to replace those shabby default drum sounds...

i bet this sounds dumb as hell in any custom soundfont

[Memfis]

Uhhh, the standard Windows thingy of course. It maintains perfect balance between being somewhat similar to the real instruments but not nearly enough to sound like inferior versions of them. Most fonts that I've tested try too hard to sound real and that's a big mistake.

[mouldy]

The midis I have made tend to sound terrible using anything other than the soundfont I used to make them, which is the standard windows one. So its probable that most midis are going to sound wrong in soundfonts they weren't designed for.

[TheUltimateDoomer666]

I use Arachno, or the 4 MB EYE & I Productions soundfont, or the Yamaha S-YXG50 VST MIDI Synth for MIDIs that need balance and would sound strange on big/"realistic" soundfonts. SONiVOX 24 MB GS soundfont might also be suitable, though a small few of the instruments in it seem to be an octave too high. The SONiVOX 250 MB GS soundfont on the other hand is pretty horribly balanced.

Still, the MS GS SW Synth should have the "perfect" balance since it's based on the Roland SC-55. The samples are poorer quality and it lacks reverb, but at least it's listenable. A soundfont 2 version exists of it, scc1t2.sf2, which can be used with something like CoolSoft VirtualMIDISynth to have reverb.

[Doomkid]

I haven't really found a soundfont that I'm crazy about, so I just use the General MIDI that comes with Windows, pretty much for the same reason as Memfis.

Is there a soundfont out there that only changes the overdrive/distortion guitars and the drums? They're the only MIDI instruments that sound "too fake" to me - Everything else, I actually quite like as-is.

Hell, I don't actually mind the guitars/drums, but it would be nice to get a change after 20 years of hearing the same thing.

[TheUltimateDoomer666]

Doomkid said:

Is there a soundfont out there that only changes the overdrive/distortion guitars and the drums? They're the only MIDI instruments that sound "too fake" to me - Everything else, I actually quite like as-is.

"Heavy_guitar_collection.sf2" is about 23 MB and contains only an overdriven guitar and a distortion guitar. I haven't really tested how it sounds with MIDI files. There are very few, if any, soundfonts that have electric guitars that are both powerful/realistic and suitable for General MIDI.

[Doomkid]

Thanks for pointing that one out for me, I'll give it a try. I'm not expecting perfection, just some variety in the sound :)

[esselfortium]

What yakfak, Doomhuntress, Memfis, and mouldy said. :)

The default SoundCanvas-based Windows MIDI instruments are so commonplace on computers nowadays that it can be safely assumed almost any MIDI made in the past decade and a half was written and mixed with those timbres in mind. Swapping them out for other sounds generally wrecks the mixing balance and inevitably makes things sound worse.

It's the audio equivalent of loading Doom with a hi-res texture replacement pack. Some of the new resources might be nice enough on their own, but they're going to make a mess out of the map (or in this case, midi) that they're being automatically pasted onto without the artist's involvement.

[Reisal]

Weeds or Merlin Vienna.

[Shadow Hog]

Personally, I use 8MBGMSFX.sf2 with everything, because it's what I got used to on my SBLive! and, generally speaking, it still sounds great with everything I've thrown it at.

Although when actually sequencing MIDIs, while I'll still do it against 8MBGMSFX.sf2, I'll still tend to test how it'll sound in the stock MS GS synth and tweak it if it sounds off there, if only because I expect most people aren't going to bother using anything fancier.

[Dragonsbrethren]

I use scc1t2.sf2 for everything these days. I used to run some higher quality soundfonts, but inevitably they'd completely ruin certain tracks. I'll take lower quality that sounds good with everything.