Terry…
Thank you for the notes. I have not had a chance to evaluate the Bismark product, but will take a look. I originally dismissed it because I misunderstood one of the notes on the product page and thought that it meant that it was only 8 channel multitimbral. A second looksee and I realized it was referring to the capability to load up to 8 soundfonts and allocate tracks/channels with specific soundfonts, e.g. using a better trumpet for one track that is in a separate soundfont.
And yes, I have just completed an eval on SynthFont and found that the VSTSynthFont64 product (free) works in Cantabile 3. When I first tried it last Friday, the popup VST window in Cantabile (also in Sonar) was a little too small to fit all the controls, and there is no way to resize the window. I wrote a note on Saturday to the developer, Kenneth Rundt, noting the problem. He responded back several hours later with screenshots of the VST running in other software correctly, and also downloaded a Cantabile demo to test the VST and it also worked correctly. After sharing my screenshots of the window sizing, which seemed like my window was using a larger font, Kenneth replied that he would send me another version of the VST to try. I got that this morning (Hell of a turnaround I might add!!), and sure enough, the version he sent worked! The original problem likely had something to do with my implementation of Win10 x64 and possibly a system font issue, but since the newer version works, I’m not going to waste any cycles about why the original didn’t work.
VSTSynthFont64, which was just released on August 29th, handles the six General MIDI soundfonts that I tried with it and plays the smaller one back just fine with Media Player in Cantabile 3, with no crashes (so far). A couple of the larger soundfiles, on the other hand stuttered on playback with the Cantabile monitor “Load” indicator going as high as 150-160 range during segments of the midi file which played 11 simultaneous tracks, but that may be due to other things related to my setup of Cantabile 3 and my desktop has not yet been optimized for audio. (Note: The Win10 Task Manager never showed more than 11% of CPU devoted to Cantabile, with nothing else eating up CPU.)
All in all, I can recommend VSTSynthFont64 as a handy addition in general, plus with the ability to play 16 part multitimbral GM soundfonts with the Media Player, it solved my immediate problem.
The other product that worked well in my evaluation was SAMPLELORD (the trademark is all caps), which sells for about $45 after Euro conversion. It has very fast loads of large soundfont files and has been rock solid in my testing. The main problem with the product relates to comments on the KVR forums that the developer does not appear to be enhancing the product and some report that he has not been responsive or involved in any forums. Probably not a major issue since it works well now, but could be adversely affected by one of Microsoft’s constant WIn10 “upgrades”.
Of course, all these comments are based on a whopping week’s worth of experimenting and going thru the learning curve. As I get more experience in these products and find problems, I’ll provide updates.
), perhaps you can check out the suggestions I made a couple posts back to your noted problem of CoolSoft crashing in Cantabile and other x64 software, as my x64 (Win10) implementation is working with no problems and does not crash in Cantabile 3 (of course doesn’t quite work either!).
