Is SoundFont change during playback *theoretically* possible?

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Posts: 5
Joined: November 20, 2016 - 11:43
Is SoundFont change during playback *theoretically* possible?

Hi again. I hope you're not yet getting tired of my comments. o.o

I'm wondering about one thing, it's concerning the inability to change SoundFonts while an application is using VirtualMIDISynth. I haven't ever taken a deep look into how virtual MIDI synthesizers work exactly myself, so this is only speculation.

I test a lot of different possible configurations, partially in order to find out what DOS games sound best with what kind of configuration, partially because I'm doing research on soundcards from the DOS times as well as the ability to emulate their characteristics via SoundFonts (also I want to eventually develop my own SoundFont specifically for boosting the audio experience of the best games of the DOS era - I've actually made my first steps in this direction, already). Anyway, that kind of experimenting/comparison of different SoundFonts would obviously be much easier if I didn't have to stop playback in mediaplayers or fully quit applications like DOSBox. So I'm wondering whether there's something you could do to allow this.

I understand that it's not possible to use the MIDI Mapper to change the MIDI device during playback, however, shouldn't it be possible to at least change the SoundFont? I'm aware that applications wait for some kind of response from VirtualMIDISynth during initialization but the way I get it VirtualMIDISynth should be able to say mute the music, load a new SoundFont and then continue playing it without interrupting the communication with the application or pausing that one (pretty much the way DAWs like Cubase behave when loading new soundbanks for the VST plugins currently playing). As far as I know applications do not need constant responses from the MIDI device so I can imagine that this should be possible.

The way I get it the inability to change the SoundFonts during playback is related to the fact that the VirtualMIDISynth's configuration tool is generally not allowed to do any changes to the behaviour of the VirtualMIDISynth MIDI device once that one has been initialized. However, couldn't there be another way for switching the SoundFont during playback like say through VirtualMIDISynth's mixer?

I can imagine that my use of VirtualMIDISynth is not what you had in mind when developing this tool and that people like me aren't your target consumer but well, I'm confident that a fair amount of users would appreciate that kind of functionality and in fact more people might start using VirtualMIDISynth due to this.

Regards
F4LL0UT

Posts: 1972
Joined: March 25, 2012 - 01:19
Soundfont change while

Soundfont change while playing is not possible because soundfont selector (VirtualMIDISynth_configurator.exe) and MIDI synthesizer (VirtualMIDISynth.dll) are two separate processes (the latter DLL will live into MIDI player .exe process). So there's no easy way for the configurator to tell synth to load a different soundfont.

Next 2.x version of VirtualMIDISynth will have this option, because the synth and configurator components will be joined into the same process.
See FAQ #5 for further info: http://coolsoft.altervista.org/virtualmidisynth/faq

Posts: 5
Joined: November 20, 2016 - 11:43
Thanks for the reply. And

Thanks for the reply. And yeah, that's pretty much what I meant. Awesome stuff.
I'll make a donation soon since a project like this really deserves to be supported. :)
Keep up the good work!