Support for SF3 soundfonts.

[Grizzly]

Fluidsynth these days supports SF3 soundfiles, but GZDoom's implementation of fluidsynth does not. SF3 is a vorbis-compressed variant of SF2. For instance, the FluidR3Mono_GM.sf2 file is 125MB. The sf3 variant is 15MB.

Implementation in GZDoom would permit GZDoom itself but also mod authors to include a higher quality soundfont without dedicating the 90% of the download to the soundfonts that MuseScore uses these days.

[Graf Zahl]

If someone manages to compile a fluidsynth.dll that isn't a clusterfuck of dependencies we're good to go. I haven't managed yet to build such a thing.

[_mental_]

Indeed, where are all these MinGW fans when they are needed? Official FluidSynth releases contain lots of DLLs, and moreover, they interfere with our sndfile. I didn't investigate it further though, it could be our fault too.

[NightFright]

Just keep in mind that sf3 only saves disk space, but not memory. Soundwaves still need to be internally decompressed/converted from ogg to wav and in the end it's the same. It usually also doesn't come without quality loss. I had for example audible crackling in some instruments after compressing from sf2 to sf3. Personally I am not a fan of the entire concept.

There are good soundfonts out there around 30mb, anyway, so compression is not really relevant. I would be sceptical about extremely large soundfonts (larger than let's say 150 MB), they usually sound like total garbage.

But then again, when it comes to soundfonts, everybody has different preferences.

[Chris]

Personally I am not a fan of the entire concept.

I would agree. It's one thing to lossily compress the result that you're just going to play back as-is, but lossily compressing each individual instrument sample that needs to be processed with filters, pitch adjustment, reverb, chorus, and get mixed together with dozens of other similarly-compressed sounds... the compression artifacts will build up. You really want clean source samples if you're intending to mix a bunch of them together with several effects. Besides, you're likely to be pressed more for run-time memory than storage, which this doesn't help with. On my ancient system, I have absolutely no issue holding on to a "quality" 240MB uncompressed soundfont, but playing a game with it loaded in memory is what makes my system buckle.