Its a shame really that for so long none of our colleagues out there have provided you with the answer. It seems to me that there is an unspoken law that a new creative user must graduate to adulthood by finding out how his/her equipment functions on his/her own by trial and error. I don't like this attitude and therefore now that I have spotted your thread I will help you to my best of knowledge. I apologise for not assisting you earlier, but a trip to greece combined with an infernal crash of my PC that caused me to install linux and forget windows and doors and conservatories, kept me away from the net.
So.
You wanna work with soundfonts. Open Audio HQ and under that select Soundofnt. Now you got a few tabs to play with there. On the first, the one you are on when the app opens, is where you load and unload them. I assume you know a bit but, a soundofnt is a collection of instrument/sound samples that have been mapped and characterised in such a fashion so that their playback produces -or tries to produce- (not necessarilly, but usually) a realistic instrument sound. The samples are combined/mapped totally or partially on the MIDI keyboard range (128 notes, 0-127) to achieve this, and that on its own constitutes an instrument. So for instance 10 piano samples are mapped to a range of keys centering on the key each sample was obtained by, so that playing every key under MIDI will resemble piano. Samples can also be mapped according to how hard a key is pressed (known as attack velocity). Additionally, the MIDI key range a sample covers can overlap with another samples' range (so if keys 023-033 have a rain sample, you can put a thunder sample to be played back on range 030-045, or 023-033, or 020-050 or even 000-127, in which case every note on the MIDI keyboard
will play the thunder sample, accompanied by the rain sample in keys 023-033). Technically, in an instrument you can put any number of samples to be played back.
MIDI doesn't playback necessarily one instrument only. This is a bit tricky. MIDI has 16 stereo playback channels per synthesiser. SBLive has three; two hardware synths (Live A and Live B) and a software synth (Wavesynth; this has its own samples and is frankly very cacky!). At any timepoint, a single synth can be playing 16 voices simultaneously, but not necessarily 16 instruments only. This is because a "voice" can be mapped to correspond to 1 or more instruments found in the soundfont. This is not controlled in NWC itself, but in the soundfont, because that is what contains the voices. NWC and any MIDI sequencer just tells the voices what notes to play and how.
In the soundfonts, a "voice" is known as a bank. This bank therefore, can contain any number of instruments. For the specific back, each instruments' properties can be tweaked to differ from the template instrument, but the template itself remains unaffected i.e. the piano instrument described above can be placed in the centre in stereo sound (known also as panned to the centre) in the tempalte, yet a bank can be configured specifically to playback the piano panned to the right. Another bank can continue to play it at teh centre, if not instructed otherwise. Also the bank can be adjusted to affect the playback of all the instruments it contains. So if you set a global control under a bank to modulate the playback, all instruments included in teh bank will modulate. I.e. the piano will modulate, and pan to the right as well.
Finally, there can be 128x128=16384 different banks, because the addresses of banks are described by two numbers that range both from 0-127. I.e. it is like a table of 128 rows and 128 columns, containing 16384 cells. The number of possible instruments and samples is infinite. The only limit to the story is the amount of memmory your PC has, so, if you want to take my advice, start collecting some dosh for a memo upgrade. Want to know why? Go to
http://liste.to.hammersound and you'll get my point!
So going back to the soundfont app in Audio HQ, the first window allows you to manipulate the loading of soundfotns onto memmory. The way I understand it is that the first loaded SF (soundfotn) is the primary SF, whose used banks are used by MIDI sequencers. Secondary SFs fill up the gaps, i.e. the banks left free by the primary SF (i.e. those that the soundfont does not map any instruments to). To do this, the used banks in the secondary SF must be mapped to the addresses of the empty banks of the primary SF, or else they will be (unfortunately) loaded and (yet) disregarded by the sequences. So if the primary SF uses banks 000-000 through to 000-110, the secondary SF's banks, in order to be played back must be mapped from 000-111 to 127-127 (i.e 000-111 to 000-127 and 001-000 to 001-127 and 002-000 to 002-127, and so on and so forth). Secondary SF banks are known also as external banks.
The second tab claims that allows you to manipulate the banks themselves, which is quite amusing considering the fact that to load/unload a bank, the corresponding SF must be loaded/unloaded first! And all it contains too! The one thing you can really do here is check what banks are occupied and by which soundfont. So you can then open Vienna and map the banks of the SF you which to load to empty slots. It does have its use...
The third tab controlls the amount of memmory allocated to soundfonts. I believe the default to be 12MB. That can easily change by dragging the bar to.... <drum roll> ...the 1/2 of your maximum physical memmory! So if you are running a 32 or 64 MB RAM PC, I hope for your nerves' sakes the shops are open for you to go and upgrade! As you can hear, even the 8mb SF provided with the live! that contains a large number of sounds is rather not convincing of fantastic quality. That is because the samples used are limited and far from the real McCoy. Go to Hammersound and you 'll come accross a SF known as Campbells' Piano that is 25MB big! That is ONE piano. And the guy has posted thre of them, each at that size. I really hope the shops are open mate!
S
PS: Hope that helps a bit!
