When I first started with softsynths and soundfonts and things, the first thing I noticed was, yeah, the sounds are great, but not so much the documentation as to what was actually in the soundfonts, and how to address them. Now, I'm not big on hunt-and-peck, tiptoing through hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, of program-change combinations to get the most out of a soundfont, and I always thought that if there is software to compile a soundfont out of samples and instructions as to how to access them, there's got to be a program that can deconstruct them, or at least read them and tell the human what they contain. Nearly a year later, I've found such a program. It's called Viena (not to be confused with Vienna), available from http://www.synthfont.com. It opens a soundfont (.SF2) file as if it were a word-processing document and lays everything out on the screen in nice accessible fashion. One of the functions on its file menu will export the presets list to a file of fixed-format records (once you strip off a few lines of header you don't need), and that file, in turn, can be massaged with a text editor via a simple macro to rearrange and reformat the individual lines a little bit. The result, if you do it all correctly, is the perfect stuff for QWS instrument definition data. Add the required two-line header at the top, a little documentation if you're of a mind, save it, then bring it into QWS and assign it as the instrument definition for your port of choice.
Since Andre's big soundfont file is in wide use, and I'll bet a not-so-strong American dollar that most QWS and TheSoundfont users aren't getting nearly everything out of this file that they could, I submit the attached. There are over 400 sounds in this thing, all addressable and all with real names. So, save the attachment, drop it into your QWS folder, open the instruments dialog on the Options menu, and assign it as the instrument definition for whatever you call Onj's Soundfotn on your system. Then, go and enjoy yourself romping through the sounds. If there is sufficient interest, I will turn my editor macro into a VBScript file that will take the text output from Viena and convert it directly to a QWS instrument definition file, then give you the VBScript which you can then run on your own soundfont presets lists you make with Viena.
inst_onj_soundfont.ini
Description: Binary data
