TOPIC: Implementing bank select lsb in soundfonts

Hi everyone!

While looking at the soundfont specification with a friend, we saw that the wBank and wPreset values, which determine the bank and preset numbers of presets in a soundfont file, are 16-bit values (rather then 8-bit values). So, the last 8 bits of each value in a soundfont file are normally unused.

My proposal is to use the unused 8 bits of the wBank value to encode the bank select lsb control change (CC#32), increasing the number of possible instrument spaces to just over 2 million.

This would be very useful, as this would allow proper XG or GM2 support, among other things, but getting other people to support this implementation might be difficult.

Maybe, if we implement it in Polyphone, we can make it an optional feature which can be enabled or disabled, to prevent confusion, because not all players would support this.

I hope you read all of this,

sylvia.

I am the friend mentioned in the post (stgiga). It was a very interesting discovery!

sounds great! what about composing a piece for two million instruments in advance?
regards bottrop

I think "WORD wPresetBagNdx;" It won't be enough to hold them all.

The main use for doing MSB+LSB via the full wBank utilization is storing General MIDI 2 and Yamaha XG patches properly, since both use LSB for banks. Sylvia has already made a proof-of-concept XG soundfont that uses this 16bit wBank discovery. Meaning no need to split banks just for storing XG right, what with its LSB use. This is a major feature that is very important to add.

The test soundfonts:

XG:
soundfonts.kor.ninja/Soundfont%20Researc...font%20reference.sf2

GM2:
soundfonts.kor.ninja/Soundfont%20Researc...font%20reference.sf2

Interesting but both of these links give a 404 Not Found error!!!

csw900