WHAT IS A SOUNDFONT / SOFT-SYNTH?
The definition: A Soundfont is data (in a standard format) which contain the detailed information necessary to create musical notes (or sound effects) using Wave Sample Synthesis. A piece of software which uses a Soundfont to produce sound (thru your soundcard) is generally referred to as a soft-synth or software synthesizer. Some software synthesizers have only a single Soundfont embedded in the software while others are capable of using many different Soundfonts loaded from your computer’s hard drive. Such a Soundfont contains both the digital audio samples, which have been captured from a sound source, and the instructions to the wave sample synthesizer on how to articulate this sound. The term Soundfont is used because it is very much like a typefont. It is designed to contain information in such a way that a variety of wave sample synthesizers can reproduce the sound with an accuracy dependent only on the hardware’s capability. A piano sound, for example, is just like a letter “p”
