Author: Fabrice

Download a sound bank (SoundFonts) to emulate real instruments

Why a SoundBank?

Nothing beats the sound of a real instrument. A computer program, as sophisticated as possible, will never render an instrument in a perfect realistic way.

The sound banks, as they contain samples of real instrument, can get you closer to the most realistic sound for your Karaoke player.

More informations on how to improve MIDI sound

Which one?

The sound banks proposed on this page are my favorites and the one I use almost always.

• Timbres of Heaven from Don Allen (354 Mb)
• Arachno Soundfont from Maxime Abbey (148 Mb uncompressed)

They contain all the 128 MIDI instruments, so you will have no any other manipulation to do once downloaded and set up in the VirtualMidiSynth synthesizer.

Where can I find others?

There are many others available on the internet, some are general, they contain the 128 instruments of the MIDI standard (GM), and others are specialized for a single instrument (piano, guitar etc …).

Share your experience

If you use SoundBanks, do not hesitate to share your experiences, otherwise, start with the one I propose and make your own idea.

Notes:

Downloading a sound bank (SoundFonts) only makes sense if you have downloaded previously a synthesizer capable of managing it. This is the combination of the two that will allow you to significantly improve the sound reproduction of your MIDI songs.

The SoundBank (SoundFonts) is a creation of E-mu.
A SoundBank contains samples of many instruments.
These samples are in .wav format and are organized as MIDI instruments for use by applications that use this format.

Replace the basic Windows synthesizer with the excellent VirtualMIDISynth from CoolSoft

As you may have noticed, the sound reproduction of MIDI files is often disappointing.
This is due to the poor performance of the basic Windows synthesizer responsible to “interpret” your MIDI files.
Fortunately, you can significantly improve the sound quality by replacing it with another synthesizer, free, more powerful, and especially able to manage “banks of sounds” that contain samples of sounds of real instruments. (which is not the case of the synthesizer provided by Windows)

As explained in this article, in order to significantly improve the sound reproduction of MIDI files, you better replace the basic synthetizer provided by Windows, responsible for “(massacre) interpreting” your MIDI files, by another more powerful synthesizer, and especially capable of managing “sound banks” that contain sound samples of real instruments (which is not case of Windows one)
For more details, read this post.

The solution I use consists in replacing the basic Windows synthesizer with the VirtualMIDISynth synthesizer developped by CoolSoft.
But that’s not all, as explained above, you will have also to download a sound bank.
A sound bank is a file containing samples of sounds of real instruments.
A new synthetizer and a Sound Bank will change your mind about the sound quality of MIDI files.
Do not hesitate, the improvement is radical.

• To go to the Coolsoft website and be sure to get the latest version of VirtualMIDISynth, click here.

Note :

VirtualMIDISynth installs as a new MIDI output device under Windows, so its use is totally transparent, and best of all, it can also be used from any application or video game that will improve its sound!