Snowy Night

Hi Tony,

Yes, you would need the same sound fonts to hear it exactly as I did it, since I had these instruments loaded as I worked in Composer. There are two ways to go about it, as far as I know. The first way requires that your system have a sound card.

I got the Magic and ZFS banks from http://www.sf2midi.com/index.php . This site has a lot of free downloads (requires registration). I used Sound font Librarian to add the presets for these instruments to the GM bank that came with my sound card. (Sound font Librarian: http://www.sf2midi.com/index.php?page=software .) Then I used the Sound font Bank Manager that came with my card to load the changed GM bank into the built in synth.

If your system doesn't have a sound card, you can use Synthfont (www.Synthfont.com). To use this, you open a midi file in it, then click on an instrument and use F3 to navigate to the bank (like ZFS), then F4 to choose a preset (like #40 solo violin). You can play back the midi file and/or have Synthfont record the piece to .wav or .mp3, which by setting it to record to a file and not speakers, takes a very short time.

Composer will have a similar capacity in the near future, I understand.

For now, the most simple thing would be if I put an mp3 recording of the piece on www.soundclick.com/mgjacobs , where you can listen to or download the recording. I will put it there tomorrow.

I'm far from being an expert on this sort of thing. I'm not even sure I always have the terminology correct. (I hear the individual instruments in collections referred to as patches sometimes and presets at others, for example.) But all the software I mentioned has help available.

all best,
mgj