Topic: BASSMIDI Soft Synth for Windows

[Sidhe Priest]

Kode54 has released a driver version of the BASSMIDI soft synth by Ian Luck. This is the synth that Ian wrote for his player, XMPlay. You can download the soft synth here. It works with Soundfont banks. Here's how it plays Descent.mid with my own Silverspring bank (which is quite complex). It's not ideal (the synth bass 2 sounds monstrous/huge on a Creative card, say), but it works.

Details

So finally there's a quality soft-synth SF2 driver for Windows. If you need something to play MIDI music with, this one is it. DOSBox will output MIDI to Windows' default device when Descent is set to use "General MIDI". Get a decent Soundfont bank and there'll be some lively MIDI music.

[Pumo]

Sounds very interesting (and hopefully easier to setup than Timidity). Do you know if it does have a limit on Soundfont size, or it loads whatever Soundfont you put on it as long as you have enough memory?

[Sidhe Priest]

Looks like the size is only limited by memory.

It doesn't load instruments until needed, which is a bit of a problem... With large/complex banks there's crackle and dropouts when loading instruments the first time. The method sure preserves memory, but sometimes the song needs a restart to play fine after the instruments are loaded.

[Pumo]

Cool. I've tested with a custom soundfont I made (around 500~ MB) and it works perfectly. Great find Sidhe Priest!

This is definitely a must have! :thumbs up:

[Crash]

This is brilliant and I salute you for your submission. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I look forward to getting proper MIDI from my Win7 system.

[Sidhe Priest]

What language.

[Kaiaatzl]

I'd love to see a soundfont where the Choir Aahs are changed to ominous latin chanting - maybe a different latin word for each note.

This sounds cool but I have no idea how to set these things up, and I don't use midi much anymore anyway.

[Scyphi]

Neither do I, mostly because foobar (to my honest surprise) apparently won't play them. At least, I never got it to work. So I made mp3 copies of them instead. Same midi-style music, just now in a more modern mp3 format.

[SaladBadger]

Foobar2000 needs a plugin, foo_midi in order to play MIDI files. With foo_midi you can then select from one of several synths (including BASSMIDI) and pick a soundfont of your preference (but out of weirdness I tend to just use a roland soundfont. heh)

[TechPro]

Foo_midi

[Crash]

What language.

I'm not sure I quite follow you.

[Sidhe Priest]

I'd love to see a soundfont where the Choir Aahs are changed to ominous latin chanting - maybe a different latin word for each note.

What's your soundcard? Creative's Vienna Soundfont editor is free, but it uses the hardware engine of Creative soundcards.

It might be doable if you can find a choir that can sing the words, and record that. There were some chanting instruments out there, but not in Soundfont format, and usually they don't have complete note mapping, e. g. it's usually one real unity note for two-four neighbouring, if not a whole octave.

[Pumo]

There's an (also free) alternative to Vienna.
It's called Viena (with just a single 'N') and can edit soundfonts on any soundcard (it doesn't depends on Creative hardware).