the cheap Iron Pack instruments from SoundIron, are available/bundled as sfz. Many Kontakt libraries that you'd assume require full Kontakt, e.g. Here's an example, a multi-miked Kawai concert grand piano (pianos are especially well-suited to the format): You probably already have more sfz instruments than you realize. There have been a number of quality commercial libraries adapted to sforzando.

It's actually possible to dive deep into the world of sampled instruments and never set foot in the Kontakt universe. It's not multi-timbral, it doesn't come with a big collection of instruments, the UI is simple and updates have been sparse (after 5 years it's still version 1). Plogue sforzando, though basic, lets anybody experience sfz playback. There will never be a third-party Kontakt player. The Kontakt environment may be light years beyond soundfonts, but it's proprietary. Despite their limitations they continue to be widely-used because they are public standards. etc/conf.Good analogy between MIDI and Soundfonts. You can modify the configuration file /etc/conf.d/fluidsynth and change the driver to PulseAudio, then restart fluidsynth and PulseAudio: If your fluidsynth application is set to use alsa as driver, the sound card will be accessed directly and pulseaudio and applications using pulseaudio will not be able to work properly. Troubleshooting Conflicting with PulseAudio regex '.*?$' -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 -P $maxjobs bash -c 'midi2ogg. Maxjobs=$(grep processor /proc/cpuinfo | wc -l) Here is a little script to convert multiple midi files to ogg in parallel: $ fluidsynth -nli -r 48000 -o synth.cpu-cores=2 -T oga -F example.ogg /usr/share/soundfonts/FluidR3_GM.sf2 example.MID Simple command lines to convert midi to ogg: $ fluidsynth -l -T raw -F - /usr/share/soundfonts/FluidR3_GM.sf2 example.mid | twolame -b 256 -r - example.mp3 Simple command lines to convert midi to mp3:

usr/share/soundfonts is the default location of FluidR3_GM Requires soundfont-fluid or any other soundfont of your choice. $ SDL_SOUNDFONTS=/usr/share/soundfonts/FluidR3_GM.sf2. To use fluidsynth with programs that use SDL_Mixer, you need to specify the soundfont as: Common values of these parameters and additional tips are also listed at Professional audio. Note: To achieve a low latency in a real-time setup, it is important to set the RATE/NUM/SIZE parameters described in the FluidSynth wiki.

Professional soundfonts