I also recently purchased the famous vcgs4mb4.sf2. However, I cannot tell how it is doing regarding instrument balance/volume. in Dark Forces also don't seem to be a problem. I checked it in Doom, ROTT and Duke3D and it seems to do a pretty good job there, too.

For a soundfont under 30 MB it sounds pretty good in my opinion. Bredel's 8MBGM Enhanced v1.8 from 2008? It's based on the Merlin 8mbgm_plus13, and the guy put a lot of effort into it in order to optimize it for Descent, Monkey Island and Indiana Jones. The differences aren't likely to be all that noticeable during gameplay, however. Guess Creative was a little careless when they made those soundfonts. However, the Jazz drumkit's preset is still present in the soundfont, but it is just a duplicate of the standard drumkit instrument. However, 8MBGM.SF2 has a lower filter for the standard drumkit's 2nd kick drum, whereas 8MBGMSFX.SF2 has a much higher filter, so the kick drum in the regular 8MBGM.SF2 soundfont sounds very muffled when directly compared with the other soundfont.Īlso, the Jazz drumkit instrument group is missing from the *SFX soundfont. Lower filter frequencies make the samples sound more muffled.

As an example, the standard drumkit's Snare 2 sample (the one you hear in most of the DOOM music) has a filter frequency of 3,075 Hz in 8MBGM.SF2, but in 8MBGMSFX.SF2 that sample has a filter frequency of 1,844 Hz. Different attenuation, volume envelopes, filter frequencies, etc. It's possible that they removed such melodic instrument samples to make space for the SFX samples that they added (which is why both soundfonts are about the same size), so 8MBGM.SF2 would probably be better for GM usage.Įdit: There are also a lot of subtle differences between the two soundfont's standard drumkits. Another difference is that some instruments, such as the Oboe, have their samples mapped slightly differently in the *SFX soundfont for some reason some samples are missing so other samples have been remapped to fill in the spaces. The *SFX one has an SFX drumkit that contains sound effects (DOOM and most other games do not use this kit). 8MBGMSFX.SF2 has 526 samples, 136 instruments, and 138 presets. 8MBGM.SF2 has 525 samples, 136 instruments, and 137 presets.

Sfpack to sf2