cerendir

Two orchestral pieces written for OSS strategy game Battle for Wesnoth:

Traveling Minstrels
The King is Dead

These might not be definitive versions but I've tinkered with them so long that I need to move on to some new material.

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Athlon 64 X2 4400+, 2GB RAM, Soundblaster Live! Value & kX, Cubase SX 2, custom orchestral library.

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stylus02

excellent! are these soundfonts or hd- tracks?

cerendir

Thank you stylus. It's all soundfonts, a small (~700MB) library that I've put together.

BTW, "hd-tracks"?

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Maddogg6

I think he refers to 'loops' - Like ACID loops. my apologies if Im wrong...

also - yes - excellent work on them songs - they really seem to fit for what that game looks like.

cerendir

Loops? Heck, no! Loops might be fine for electronica and hip hop, but for orchestral... no way.

Thank you maddogg.

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stylus02

not only loops. i meant harddisks recording from any source and multitrack playback via asio & kx dsp effects or such a thing.
in any case soundfonts are efficiently.

cerendir

Ah, I see!

In any case, no, there's no audio tracks. Just midi and soundfonts (and an insane number of SFZ player instances). But I use kX ASIO, of course.

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Maddogg6

yeah.. too bad thats not multi-timbral.... but....

cerendir

Oh, but it is. Each instance can play back 16 midi channels simultaneously, as long as those 16 patches are in the same soundfont file. The problem is that there's only one output, so I have to use many, many instances to get panning, eq and fx routing right.

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TravelRec.

You havenīt used the hardware synths of your card for playing the soundfonts?
Anyway, great arrangements! Good work!

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cerendir

Nope. With the 32MB sample playback limit of the old Live! cards, that would be pretty much impossible. SFZ with DFD streaming and kX ASIO works smooth as silk though, no problems at all. These days I actually prefer doing all synth stuff exclusively in software.

edit: and besides, SFZ sounds better than kX's sf2 playback.

Thank you. I'll be posting some more material later on, if anyone's interested.

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Maddogg6

Multi-timbral means using different patches on those 16 channels..
From: MIDI Channels and Multitimbral Sound Modules
the underlined part is thus, important.
Otherwise - the polyphony can be split between seperate channels (as is SFZ) (all thats really happening is a MIDI merge)

If this is my informed statement - I havent seen how to get them to work in multi-timbral mode.... oh - are you using the SFZ+ (the one that is not free?

This is also true with my A2 (in kX) as well - but I can 'dynamically' load up to 32MB - tho I thought that was also true with lives as well

there is also a noticeable difference between kX synths and SFZ in how sample attack is performed/sounds - SFz is noticeably 'crisper' than kX Synths... tho - this isnt kX fault - its true with any Live/Audigy with CL drivers...
Tho many of my sound fonts were programmed with a purposely inserted delay in the sample to help combat this. (Ie... samples have a 5-6 sample NULL or '0' value inserted before tha actual sample starts. This was known for quite sometime (erm, I learned that from my AWE32, and has carried over since). Even still - SFZ sounds cripser.

cerendir

Uh... yeah? Wasn't that what I said? A soundfont file can contain hundreds of different patches. One instance of SFZ can play back 16 of those simultaneously, on 16 different midi channels, like a classic sound module.

SFZ can't load multiple sf2 files though, if that's what you're getting at. But since you can load as many instances of it as your DAW will allow, that is not a huge problem.

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Maddogg6

sorry - I edited my post...
I tried with the free one - and its not multi-timbral.... or It would not use but 1 patch at a time anyway...(maybe its an old version ... but the devs sold to Cakewalk....)

cerendir

I'm using the free version and yes, it is definitely multitimbral. Trust me, I should know

Most likely you misunderstood how it's supposed to be set up or something -- which is understandable as the UI is a bit clunky. Initially I thought it was a little confusing too.

The free SFZ is still available here. Get it while it's still around; who know what will happen with it in the future. For a while I was thinking of buying SFZ+ (tried the demo and it's a very nice app) but two things made me decide against it. 1) It does not load SFZ files (!), and 2) I'm hesitant to buy a program that might never see an update again since the developers have been munched up by some big corporation.

Besides it's also a little overpriced considering how powerful the free version is.

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