On Sat, 11 Jan 2014, Noeck wrote:
But you can do better than default timidity:
timidity/timidity++ has no default soundfont. In fact it doesn't have
a soundfont at all. It's the distributions that provide a soundfont or
patchset and use this as default.
But if you want to use another soundfont, you are free to do so. You
just need to edit or replace the *.cfg file.
For example on Fedora the FluidR3 soundfont is used by default (On
fedora it's split into three packages namely fluid-soundfont-common,
fluid-soundfont-gm, and fluid-soundfont-gs)
But in the Fedora repositories you can also find
PersonalCopy-Light-soundfont.
And there are many more, free and nonfree, available from other sources.
Under Ubuntu (and I suppose Debian and other distributions) there is a
package called fluid-soundfont-gm
If you install that and use it in timidity by changing the following
line in /etc/timidity/timidity.cfg:
- source /etc/timidity/freepats.cfg
+ source /etc/timidity/fluidr3_gm.cfg
You can play at least all the 6 examples from your mail.
Unfortunately another poster needed to replace fluidR3 with freepats,
because he was having stereo panning problems with fluidR3 ...
I need to investigate these cases but: sometimes it could be that it's
not the soundfont but timidity's .cfg file that causes a problem.
The simplest cfg file for a soundfont named "example.sf2" would simply
contain one single line
soundfont example.sf2
This way it is possible to hear what is caused by the soundfont only,
and not influenced by settings in a timidity.cfg file.