Musescore and the Silent Soundfont - Help!
Hi all,
Recently I downloaded the City Piano soundfont (SFZ format) from Bigcat Instruments. I liked it a lot - until this morning, when I clicked onto Musescore and realized that it had reverted to its original sf3 soundfont. I went to the synthesizer and selected CityPiano (it calls itself citypianocc there) but the sound did not change.
So I did a bit of research online and discovered that you have to select citypianocc in the mixer as well as the synthesizer for it to play - which is odd, because even though I hadn't known that before, Musescore had still played with the new soundfont (at least I'm 99% sure it had; I had someone else compare the quality when I switched it back and forth and they said there was a major difference. I agreed.)
I went back to Musescore and selected citypianocc in the synthesizer and the mixer. The result? Utter, complete, and disheartening silence.
I did a factory reset on Musescore and deleted and reinstalled the soundfont, again selecting it in both the mixer and the synthesizer. This time it played the soundfont in a weird, muffled tone which is completely unlike the way it sounded before. Think blankets over the strings.
What I have done so far:
-I extracted the soundfont and put it in the Musescore 'Soundfonts' folder.
-I put it in the synthesizer, making sure it was on top.
-I deleted all other soundfonts, Fluid and Zerberus alike, from the synthesizer.
-I selected it in the mixer.
-I played around with reverb and its counterparts, to no avail.
-I tried it on other scores - silence or muffled craziness. I also experimented with it on a Linux machine, with the result of silence.
-I tried another soundfont, with the same result - silence, not even a muffled playback, just nothing at all.
-I checked the audio on my computer - works just fine.
-I switched it back to the built-in soundfont, which works fine.
-I tried a violin soundfont (sf2 format) which also works just fine.
Specs:
-Windows 10/Linux Mint
-Musescore 2.1.0 (no updates available)
-score is written for only one instrument.
I hope I got all the information in there, but if you need more please don't hesitate to ask. I could really use some help. Thanks so much everybody!
Comments
A not very specific suggestion ;-): https://musescore.org/en/handbook/revert-factory-settings
Maybe attache the score for further investigation, you've trouble with, but you wrote already, it appears with other scores too, so it's probably not the reason of a specific score.
Note: Sorry, read just you did it already.
When you add a new soundfont, if it appears at the top of the list of installed soundfonts, and it is compatible with General MIDI, then you don't need to do anything special in the Mixer in order for it to work. Only if you add the soundfont somewhere other than at the top of the list, or if it is not GM-compatible, would you neeed to mess with the Mxier, to tell MuseScore how to find the sounds you want.
I'm guessing this soundfont isn't GM-comaptible, so no surprise you might need to play with the Mixer, although since piano is the first sound in a GM soundfont and I'd expect a soundfont with the word "piano" in the name to also do this, it really should just work. Making me think the file you donwloaded is just bad.
In reply to When you add a new soundfont… by Marc Sabatella
That's what I thought too, only it seemed strange since I tried another soundfont that also didn't work. I'm noticing that SFZ's don't seem to work, while sf2's invariably do.
Also, does it matter that it's 'citypianocc' all one word? Perhaps the mixer doesn't know what to do with that name or something. (I say this because the other soundfont I tried also didn't have the word 'piano' as a separate word in the name.)
In reply to That's what I thought too,… by lesdp2
With SFZ files, you need to be sure to include the whole folder full of audio samples - the SFZ file itself doesn't really do anything on its own.