Mixer instrument list mess
Mixer shows instrument soundfont list in random and very awkward order.
When I aim to search for a soundfont for violin, why aren't all violin fonts shown first on top followed by "all-strings"?
Also, Fluid and Zerberus fonts should be grouped together and listed in some logical order, like alphabetic or by-instrument. With sfz and Fluid fonts - the instrument list can be several pages long and there is no search facility...
Comments
The soundfonts are listed in the order they appear in the synthesizer, then the sounds are listed according to the bank they are in in the sound font. This allows you to know which soundfont a sound is in. You may want to use the violin from the 3rd soundfont you have listed. You can easily tell which soundfont you are viewing by the (1) next to sounds in the second soundfont, (2) in the third sound font and so on. No number is sound font 0. Unfortunately programmers like to count from 0 rather than 1.
The order does seem rather random, but the order is the same as they are listed in the soundfont. If the soundfont is GM compatible, then the list of sounds by bank are listed at https://www.midi.org/specifications-old/item/gm-level-1-sound-set.
I agree it would be nice to be able to search easily for all violin sounds and know which soundfont each is in, but no one has come up with an acceptable interface that gives that information. At one point someone had the sounds listed by instrument, but the list looked something like (there are 4 soundfonts in this sample list):
Grand piano
Grand piano
Grand piano
Honky tonk Piano
Honky tonk Piano
Violin
Violin
Violin
Violin
Pizz. Violin
Pizz. Violin
Pizz. Violin
Strings
Strings
Strings
It was chaos, there was no way to tell which sound was in which soundfont unless you had a list of sounds for each one.
As long as you understand how the sounds are listed in the mixer, it's tolerable. Searching is not very efficient, but you can to "vi" quickly, repeatedly to look for the next instrument that starts with "vi", unfortunately it will select the next violin, viola or vibraphone listed. If you can type the letters fast enough, you can type more than 2 letters, but for instruments that don't start with vi or ba, two letters is usually enough to not find too many unwanted instruments. It takes at least 5 letter to get good results for instruments that do start vi or ba, and I can't type fast enough for that.
In reply to The soundfonts are listed in… by mike320
Search by a starting letter will miss "1-st violin SOLO" entry...
If a search is to be meaningful it needs to scan for "violin" in listed entries of sounds.
The fact that User clicked on "violin" in the Mixer means that he/she plans to explore violin sounds. The displayed list of sounds should reflect such a search: it should return fully identifiable entries from the "current" list that contain word "violin". The full list can follow after a separator but I suspect it will be rarely used if the search works.
Maybe we should consider adding a "search box" in which User can list letter sequences such as "sfz", "pizz","SOLO" etc... to narrow down the search?
In reply to Search by a starting letter… by mountbest@gmail.com
Search by a starting letter will miss "1-st violin SOLO" entry...
If you have an instrument call 1-st violin SOLO, then pressing 1 will go to it.
I've never seen an instrument called sfz in a soundfont. As far as finding sfz, pizz and solo in a palette is concerned, this is already possible using the search box at the bottom of the palettes, though it works rather poorly. I wish I could just turn it off so it would stop wasting space.