rgc:audio software :: sfz High Quality SoundFont Player has supposedly upgraded to version 1.06 although good luck verifying which version you have.

The DLL has versioninfo in it says 1.0.5.0

This version is supposed to be much smarter about CPU usage.

One hidden secret goodie is the Hal Leonard Hip Hop drummer’s instruction booklet that comes with 100s of very useful sounds, one-shots and loops.

A decent collection of classical mp3s are “copyrighted” but “free.”

The site is having bandwidth issues so you it has “suspended” mp3 downloads. Really what this means is that you have to dig around for the URL and replace “.mp3″ with “.xxx” in order to download.

For MIDI files we recommend the huge database at the Classical Navigator.

VSampler has announced the release of 3.0 (FAQ at MAZ Tools).

Upgrades run from free to $150 depending on what version of what configuration you have.
(download here).

VSampler is very powerful and may just be way too much for someone who is just looking to play some soundfonts through a DXi or VSTi host. But it covers so many different formats that if you collaborate with folks that have an old box of any sort it is very likely that VSampler would be the way to bridge to the modern world.

We are now back up and online, sorry about the breakup in reception.

(Me vs. my father-in-law’s dialup modem connection: I lost.)

Reason and Live demos are great but are crippled in order to inspire purchase (or cracking?) of the real product. They both limit the time they are awake as well as disable saving and rendering.

The latter can be easily worked around if you have ReWire host — like ACID 4.0

When you don’t have several $100 dollars for these programs, even a half hour is better than nothing. What can you do in the half hour?

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As a follow up the previous conversation, Eugene from RarLab sent us an email that sets the record very, very straight:

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I’ve been working on a big 30+ minute mix, developing it in several tools. So far I’ve been dragging the final mixdown wav into Sound Forge, splitting the regions into separate files and then burning all the files separately. This seemed slightly more labor intensive than it needed to be. (I reached for the “burn region to track feature” in Sound Forge, but it’s not there — presumably because that would obsolesce CD Architect.)

The better way to do it comes from Nero [via the Sony Pictures forums]:

I use MusicMatch for burning but I couldn’t find this “Split at Index positions” feature. It may be time to switch.

I know it’s a little snobby but it’s a little surprising when I run into musicians who don’t know about RAR.

It gets phenomenal compression rates on WAV and other uncompressed sound files. I often get to 60% of original size without any loss of data. (Compared with 95% with Zip.)

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