Fluid Soundfont discussion

Overall, FluidR3 my favorite of the GM soundfonts I've tried. Trumpets and saxophones are not as good as I'd like considering jazz uses them so much, so I've thought about installing a soundfont editor and replacing these samples with ones from different soundfonts. There is a saxophone-only soundfont out there I remember liking in particular. I'd also want to add bass clarinet and a couple of other missing orchestral-type instruments. There are some non-GM orchestral soundfonts that seem like they are probably pretty good, but it's too much work reassigning all the patch numbers for me to really have investigated them beyond installing a few and listening to a sample or two. There have also been some soundfonts posted here specifically dealing with marching percussion and other "specialty" genres that could probably be incorporated as well. But you have to draw the line somewhere, as unfortunately soundfonts are monolithic, so the more instruments, the bigger the file and the more memory they take up.

In the end, it just hasn't been a high enough priority for me to actually work on this. But I think there is a *fabulous* opportunity for someone out there to develop a new soundfont for use in MuseScore - perhaps by just doing a particularly good job of what I'm describing above. My impression is that interest in the soundfont format would probably be dying out if not for MuseScore, so I don't think we'd be seeing many new soundfonts if no one from the MuseScore community steps up. Long term, it might make sense for MuseScore to pursue other playback strategies, but until then, I think it be fantastic if someone were to step up to the plate on providing a new high quality general purpose soundfont!