The Silverspring Soundfont

A sample recording of a MIDI score played with the new drumkit (also a possible saw lead replacement and the new Synth. Bass 1 & Warm Pad instruments).

A simple, "plastic" Moog Mini bass.

One layer, unfiltered, 2.33 MBs uncompressed.

Another original instrument - a multiple-harmonic heavy saw, with an old-style analogue resonant bandpass filter.

Three layers, ~20 MB uncompressed.

Supersaw.sfark.

d_e1m3.mus, of Doom. The drumkit might make it into the new version of Silverspring. The bass in the mix is the OPL FM bass. "Lo-fied" with Izotope Trash.

The JV-2080 Saw Bass, based around JV-2080 samples with some additions. Should be good for 80's music and game music. It lacks body somewhat, sounds like a cross between the Moog "plastic rubber" and typical plucked saw bass.

This instrument might make into the final version of the bank.

Moog Synthesised Strings 2 demo.

The original MIDI file.

A very raw (no tunings, just plain looped samples in their zones) SF2 file playback, the other instrument is shakuhachi.

Silverspring was originally made for NT4's Live drivers.

There was a tweaked version made for NT5, but it was never released, and the bank was pretty much abandoned, as the NT5 Liveware 3 had several flaws: it wouldn't hold notes correctly, it had some mixing problems, it was way more sensitive to multiple layers (Creative driver programmers attempted to prevent instrument dropout that happened when SB Live hit the 32-MB memory allocation limit by limiting the complexity of instruments in playback) and the overall sounding was muffled and more plasticky. Where the NT4 Live MIDI playback would start dropping out instruments and notes after a certain complexity limit was hit (usually when all channels had complex instruments loaded in), it could still play a few MIDI pieces before a reboot was required. Under NT5, often it was just a few complex layers in playback that upset the engine.

Now, the NT4 version by itself had some problems. Silverspring was never intended as a production Soundfont or anything of the kind, it was never meant for the public even; it was a bank that was thrown together for playing back MIDI scores of the Doom-engined games (to go with the Doomsday engine). Later on, Silverspring was used as the core combination of instruments for rendering MIDI files to waves which would then be loaded by Doomsday. It was tweaked accordingly, and after so many adjustments to fit particular MIDI scores it had many instruments out of volume balance.

Hopefully the Audigy 2 will not introduce more playback flaws on top of the SB Live under Liveware 3 on Windows NT5. Maybe it will even sound better and not have as many limitations (yes, the Audigy 2 doesn't have the 32-MB memory limit, but it may still have problems holding notes correctly and have other legacy of the Liveware 3 package). Though the hopes are thin as gradually carelessness increases; once past a certain stage of blossom, a project tends to experience decay, and apparently Liveware 3 was just such a recipient of neglect.

A version 2.0 of the bank might appear in the future. It's a somewhat ghostly "might" at this time, however...

There would be two variants - one single-layered, intended for an SB Live card (and possibly for non-Creative/software synths).

The second (main) variant would be aimed at Audigy 2.

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An AWE32 ROM Soundfont with ROM waves converted to regular contained samples.