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Does the Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Digital (Dell) support soundfonts?
Hello. I have a Dell OEM Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Digital card and I'm wondering if it supports soundfonts, and if so, how do you install them? The default midi font on my card is pretty nasty (Sounds like an early 80's synthesizer) and I really want to improve the sound quality of midis desperately.
I have tried the kX Audio Driver to gain access to the sound font selector on my card but the driver doesn't seem to work. (No sound whatsoever)
I'm kind of confused here and I'm not sure if I'm explaining the problem correctly but all I know is that midi music sounds atrocious on my card and I want to improve the quality if possible. I heard that a quality sound font can make midis sound like mp3s! This is what I want. Can anyone help? Thank you.
gamer767
39 Posts
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August 6th, 2005 13:00
Not even one reply??? Sheesh, that's cold man, ice cold. [sarcasm] Well, thanks to the great help and advice I got here I was able to change the sound fonts on my card. [/sarcasm] Here is what I did...
1- Uninstalled the original SoundBlaster drivers that came from Dell.
2- Installed the (Dell) Driver Install Pack 2 – 10 from creative.com
3- Installed the Creative Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Digital (Dell) Driver Update version 5.12.1.204 from creative.com
4- Installed the Creative Sound Font Bank Manager (Dell) from creative.com
Success!! Now I can fiddle and tinker with the sound fonts in my Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Digital (Dell) soundcard. Hurray for me. Now I just have to find a high quality sound font for my MIDI files. I'm open to suggestions but something tells me that I'm going to be ignored once again :(
By the way, you can get all of those drivers I mentioned at http://us.creative.com/support/downloads/download.asp Hopefully my post will be helpful to someone in the future because I sure got no %^$! help here...
arnieday
613 Posts
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August 6th, 2005 21:00
gamer767
39 Posts
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August 7th, 2005 05:00
That’s a cute response and all but I fail to see how it contributes to these forums. Perhaps my post was bit rude (I waited 4 days for a response. I feel that my frustration was justified.) but it contained useful information unlike your little snide comment. Believe it or not, many people have the same problem as I had and would be glad to learn how to install soundfonts on their Dell SoundBlaster Live 5.1 Card. It’s possible to do so, you just need to get rid of your original Dell drivers and install the drivers from Creative in the order I specified. Perhaps if Dell didn’t hide the soundfont feature in their drivers people wouldn’t have to come here looking for help…
Long story short, I have contributed and you haven’t. If you got nothing useful to say then say nothing at all.
trmb
1 Message
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August 14th, 2005 13:00
Hi,
I would like to mention that I had the same problems and that this post was useful to me, thanks for that.
Basically,
- I wanted to upgrade the driver to kx to reduce the latency of the card.
Only after installing the driver with no success, did I find out on the FAQ page of www.kxproject.com that
[quoting] : "The Dell OEM SB Live! (SB020x) is not yet supported since it uses a custom version of the EMU10k1, whose details are unknown. Experimental support may be provided when more information about it becomes available"
- I wanted to be able to use my own soundfounts, and could not find the so called AudioHQ application that chould enable this.
Thanks for your indication, this now works for me. I guess the main missing part was the soundfont bank manager that can be downloaded from creative, as the card was already capable of playing the default soundfonts.
Finally, browsing the internet, I found that http://bbrunoo.free.fr/soundfonts/soundfonts.php was pointing to interesting sites for free soundfonts, with in particular http://come.to/bovbjerg for convincing pianos.
To summarise, and because I have seen other posts where people seemed to have considered that soundfonts were not supported with Dell configurations similar to mine,
I confirm that a Dell 8200 (10/2002) + Creative SB Live 5.1 [model:SB0200] + Drivers 5.12.1.204 from Creative (29/06/2004) + Sound Bank Manager + Vienna 2.3 seem to offer full support of soundfonts.
gamer767
39 Posts
0
August 23rd, 2005 08:00
Hello trmb. I'm glad my posts were of some help to you. :) Thanks for confirming that the KX drivers don't work for Dell sound cards. I couldn’t figure out why I would get no sound whatsoever after installing them...
I have tried many different sound font collections and my favorite would have to be Titanic. You can get it at http://titanicsf.com/ipw-web/bulletin/bb/viewtopic.php?t=111 It's huge though and you need to alter your memory page pool size in the registry to accommodate such a huge sound font. Here is a guide from Creative explaining how to do this for those who are interested http://ask.americas.creative.com/SRVS/CGI-BIN/WEBCGI.EXE?New,Kb=ww_english,Company={CEAE216D-8719-4C00-AC9F-03BC258F7B70},VARSET=ws:http://us.creative.com,case=5184. Look in the how to load and configure sound font banks section of the guide...
Another good free sound font bank I found is SGM-180 v1.5. You can find it here http://www.geocities.jp/shansoundfont/
You know what; I’m just going to post most of sites and links I discovered when I was searching for free quality sound font banks. Hopefully someone will find this information useful...
http://www.members.shaw.ca/glitch/sffiles.html Nice collection here. Some rare stuff indeed. Worth a look!
http://www.personalcopy.com/sfarkfonts1.htm Home of the Personal Copy sound font bank and a few others.
http://www.hammersound.net/ Nice site with a wide selection but it appears to be slowly dying and hasn't been updated in months. As a result you might find a few dead links. Still excellent though.
http://www.homemusician.net/ Another excellent site with a wide selection. Definitely worth a look.
http://www.sf2midi.com/ Great site with a huge selection. But it requires you to register and the download speeds are somewhat slow. Don't let this discourage you though because IMHO sf2midi.com has the most comprehensive collection of free sound fonts on the net. Very good.
http://clinique.jeuxvideos.free.fr/file/Silverspring%20Gaming%201.5.zip This is a direct link to the super rare Silverspring Classic Gaming 1.5 sound font bank. It's supposedly the best sound font bank for video game music MIDI files but I didn't care for it at all. Took me a while to find this one I tell you what! lolz
Phew, I think that's enough for now. Before I go, I just want to share a site that offers MIDI versions of video game sound tracks. http://www.vgmusic.com/ is the place. I'm into game music so this place is a real treat for me. Don't laugh! I know it’s pretty nerdy but I like it darn it! ;)