Gus Soundfont License And Find

Gus Soundfont License And Find

Or (4), my own reason, you might need to use a version of timidity covered under the Lessor GNU Public License and find that the versions of timidity that can read soundfonts are protected by the more restrictive GNU Public License (e.g., Timidity or kmidi, or the Alsaplayer midi plugin).

So breaking a soundfont up into GUS patches loses information and quality, unless the GUS patch format is extended.

The patch files produced by unsf do contain most of the information and structure they had as part of the original soundfont, but the extensions to GUS format are tucked away in hidden places, as they must be, to be compatible with programs expecting to see ordinary GUS patches.

If youre using a version of timidity, just put a soundfont into the directory where you keep patches -- perhaps usrlocallibtimidity -- then cd to that directory and say unsf filename.sf2.

Unsf will create directories for each bank of instruments in the soundfont and put the patch files for all the instruments into the appropriate bank directories.

The names of the directories and patch files are derived from the names they were given inside the soundfont.

Unsf also creates a GUS type configuration file, which will be called.cfg, the part coming from the name of the original soundfont.

Edit timidity.cfg by adding the line source.cfg and youre ready to use the new patches.

What you will hear is only the keyrange set of samples for the left channel of the first velocity layer.

Sf2 instruments can have several velocity layers, meaning sets of samples tuned for the different timbres produced by different note loudness, and they can also be in stereo, with different sets of samples for the left and right channels.

These parameters are also carried over into the extended GUS patches produced by unsf.

My reference version of timidity does not interpret and use all this extra information, by any means, but it does understand velocity ranges, stereo instruments, and a couple of the extra sf2 parameters: volume-envelope-delay and exclusive-class.

The first delays the beginning of note volume envelopes by a variable amount, and the second causes notes of certain instruments to be terminated when a new note of that instrument or an instrument in the same class is begun.

As of now (Sept 2004) only the CVS version of SDLmixer has my version of timidity.

My patches for the latest released version are in the archive.