General MIDI And Why I Switched To Arachno SoundFont

Thanks for this heartful review, James. Once again 😉

Found this soundfont called Matrix SoundFont, and it has been my favorite since. The guitar, synths, drums, and practically everything makes each song sound like a Genesis single, and it is beautiful.

The thing is that Arachno and SGM both have the best audio mixing out of most of these GM soundfonts. IE, its mixed so that the instruments roughly are the same volume as the original instruments in the default midi playback. That's one of the main reasons why those two soundfonts sound so great in particular. Other soundfont makers, for some reason, don't realize that there is no real standardization to the audio (midis aren't even limited to 0db so you can have clipping as well, if sounds get to loud), so, ideally, they should be mixing the samples to be similar in volume to the originals so that compatibility is the highest. BUT that's not what people do! At all! So you have a ton of ones that are really badly mixed (not naming names) and only a couple that are doing things "right".

Of course with Virtualmidisynth and stuff you can change the volume etc. but that doesn't fix one of the samples just being overly loud or too quiet. You have to fix those things manually, and at that point I feel like the original maker of the soundfont has somewhat failed in doing what they were supposed to be, you know, doing.

I'm so OCD I just a use a sf2 that just simply remasters the default soundbank. Same sounds, but sampled at a higher bitrate.

100% agree. Excellent Sound Font! I use it almost exclusively.

Could not agree more. People ask me all the time, what MIDI modules should I get etc, and the first thing I say is have you tried the virtual MIDI soundfonts available for free out there. If so and you want more then lets discuss your MIDI gaming or composing plans.

Also outstanding explanation by the way. I might reference this video in the future James. ;D

So are you using these soundfonts on real vintage hardware, or in emulators?

Have you tried Timbres Of Heaven? I think it works great with Tie FIghter.

soundblaster awe 32...bought that card back in the day because of Duke Nuke'em 3D (stupidly expensive for a teenager)...and then had to fight with autoexec.bat and/or config.sys because most games only hat SB pro oder SB 16 supported (SB 16 IRQ 5 and awe 32 was IRQ 7 default, when i remember correctly) with their installer.

Personally, I prefer Masterpiece of Arachno any day..