What are Soundfonts?

SoundFonts is a technology used by many soundcards and software synthesizers that allow you to customize your instrument sounds for MIDI music playback or MIDI sequencing. Developed by Creative Labs and Emu Systems, SoundFont technology allows the user to improve the sound quality of their MIDI playback by either loading a better sounding General MIDI (GM) wavetable sound-set, or loading new (non-GM) sounds for use in music composition and songwriting.

Songwriters and musicians use SoundFonts to give them access to a much larger palette of sounds from which to compose. In response to the high cost of hardware samplers on the market, composers are now grabbing up less expensive SoundFont compatible soundcards and software synths and using them as pro samplers instead. In the last few years a huge variety of audio systems like this have appeared giving musicians a wide variety of choices, quality and price points.

So what do SoundFonts do? As mentioned above, if you come across a streaming MIDI site, and there are a lot of them out there (our site for example), the site will be playing their music but using your PC’s sounds. If you replace or upgrade your PC sounds, then the web music will sound a LOT better. Your new sounds can consist of a higher quality PC soundset or a stylized PC soundset.

You may want to check out our Soundfont section or the free downloads section for some freely available soundfonts.