Soft synthesizers come in vst and dxi flavors. Sound fonts are neither and
have to be played through a program called a sound font player. I know of
two that we can use, Live Synth Pro and SFZ soundfont player. Of the two,
I have had success using Live Synth Pro, though where you find it I don't
know as someone sent the installer to the list a while back (or so I
presume since I found it in my attachment folder unexpectedly one day.)
Sound fonts differ from soft synthesizers in that they are not stand-alone
applications, but require the mediation of a program like this. You will
wrap Live Synth Pro using either Directixer or the Cakewalk vst adapter,
then insert it as a dxi soft synth in your project. Check the option to
have the property box show up. This is where you will choose your sound
font. Once you've inserted the dxi synth and chosen your sound font, you
can access the track parameters through the track properties dialogue
(double enter on any part of the track) and select your patch as per
normal. Most sound fonts I've come across have one or at most a few
patches, which if the font is properly designed will appear at the end of
the patch browser list. The quality varies from horrible to quite striking.
I also found several sites with dxi and vst synthesizers that one can
download by googling "soft synthesizer vst windows" or something like that.
Chris Bartlett
