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Here's a tutorial on how to load Soundfont banks into your Creative Soundblaster card. 'Bank' is a term for a collection of sounds for each of the 128 General MIDI standard instruments. Soundfonts are miniaturised real samples of instruments and their relatively small size gives them a big advantage inasmuch as they load very quickly and don't take up a lot of disk space, and more importantly, memory space. This very successful format was devised by Creative/Emu and became very popular due to their huge-selling Soundblaster range of sound cards all having the ability to load and use soundfonts. Users can install a Soundblaster card and their computer will be able to play MIDI files automatically. If a soundcard/PC interface doesn't have this ability then the user will need to buy either software, for example a software synthesiser, or hardware like a keyboard synthesiser. There's a more detailed discussion of this on another page if you need to refer to this; go here. Soundblaster cards come with one or two banks supplied but if you want superior sounds you'll do what everyone else does and buy better banks and/or download free ones from the Internet. Better sounds, i.e. richer, more realistic sounds, mean larger audio sample files and more computer memory required to play them. I've posted links to some of the better ones on the page referred to above.
The screen shots below relate to the Soundblaster Audigy2 Platinum eX so if you have a different Creative Soundblaster card the popups, etc. will probably look slightly different, but the principles are the same so you should still be able to follow things. Ok, off we go. (1) On your PC, select Start/All Programs/and navigate to the Creative programs, then to the Soundfont Bank Manager. The path you follow will look something like this:
(2) When you click on the SoundFont Bank Manager you will see a popup something like this:
(3) The little keyboard will come in handy to click on to see if sounds are being made ok later on.
What you need to do now is make sure enough memory is allocated to accommodate the Soundfont banks you intend to load. Important note: you can load two different sets if you wish as the Soundblaster has two 'synthesisers' to play them, 'SB Audigy Synth A' and 'SB Audigy Synth B'. Not many Soundblaster owners realise this. If you're using software such as Band In A Box or sequencers like Sonar, you'll be able to choose which set/bank of sounds to use. Although Band In A Box will only allow to use one set at a time whereas more sophisticated products like Sonar allow you to use different banks for different instruments in the same song.
Click on the MIDI Devices button above over on the right. You will then see the next popup:
(4) Move the slider in the top right beneath where it says SoundFont Cache. At this stage move it roughly to the halfway point. You can always come back later after you've loaded your bank(s) and reduce this a little if too much was initially allocated. If you don't allocate enough then the load won't work. Now go to the drop down list at the bottom left labeled SoundFont Device. There'll be two choices. Select synth A for now. Then click 'OK' to close this popup, which will take you back to this one:
(5) Click on the 'Bank' button over on the top left. This will bring up the popup below. Ignore the entry in there; 'Papelmedia' is the name of a Soundfont set I happen to have loaded on my PC at present, your entry at the moment may be blank or say something different:
Note the blue bar in the pop-up above. This shows how much of your Soundfont Cache is presently occupied by Soundfonts. Or, in simpler terms, how much of the section of your computer's memory you allocated for this is filled up with Soundfont samples. You can see that the 333.1 MB shown above tallies with the picture in 4. above where we allocated that amount for Soundfonts. 311.1 refers to the size of the Papelmedia set of samples presently loaded in my 'Synth A' area.
(6) Now click on the 'Load' button. This will bring up your folder view, something similar to this:
Navigate to where your Soundfont bank file is. A Soundfont bank file will always have the file extension SF2. Highlight it and click on Open:
You should then see the name of your chosen Soundfont set appear in the Configure Bank pop - see below. If you want to unload a bank and replace it with another, highlight it as shown below and the two buttons that were grayed-out before will become available: Replace and Remove. Click on either and go back to step 6. and load another bank file.
To load a different set in Synth B go back to step 4. and for Soundfont Device choose 'SB Audigy Synth B' (or whatever your synth B is labelled as) and repeat steps 5. and 6.
Once you become familiar with loading Soundfonts you can explore the Bank Manager further and, if you wish, move on to cleverer things like loading individual instrument fonts into the Presets (see the button in the picture in step 2.) within a bank. Good luck!
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