For (e.g.) Raspberry Pi users: “SATBkc”, SATB + Accompaniment *only* soundfont

• Jun 1, 2020 - 01:57

The Raspberry Pi is a severely constricted device. Specifically, it does not have nowhere even near enough RAM (way less than 1 GiB), has laggy playback and may even crash (swap to death) during MP3 export.

For people who don’t need the full GM set and just want to play something, I’ve cobbled together “SATBkc”: Voice, Klavier (Pianoforte) and Cembalo (Harpsichord).

Get the soundfont (it’s just 7.3 MiB, as SF2, so no compression artefacts) and a test score for 3.2+ from: http://www.mirbsd.org/~tg/soundfont/

This uses:
* From the old MuseScore 2.0/2.1 soundfont Fluid (R3) Mono, the piano (because the wonderful new piano of MS_General is 100 MB alone, even if it’s desirable).
* From MuseScore_General 0.2, the left channel of the Choir Aahs (panned to centre) to hopefully get them mono without too much loss of quality (saves another 2½ MB), including their Expressive preset for Single-Note Dynamics, and the Harpsichord.

Tested with both MuseScore 2.3.2 and 3.2.3 ☻

This could be combined with TimGM6mb to get the full GM set plus better voice/piano/cembalo sounds in just 13 MiB of hard disc space.

Debian/*buntu/Raspbian users: place SATBkc.sf2 in /usr/share/sounds/sf2/ and use the following command to make it the default MuseScore soundfont (you can still add MS_General in the Synthesiser, but it won’t be loaded by default to save RAM): sudo update-alternatives --force --install /usr/share/sounds/sf3/MuseScore_General.sf3 MuseScore_General.sf3 /usr/share/sounds/sf2/SATBkc.sf2 2000

Full applicable licence information is contained in the ICMT chunk of the SoundFont file. (It’s basically the same as MuseScore_General with a few lines stripped because the samples are not present.) Go thank @schriscollins and @ChurchOrganist for this, not so much me (I just took the time to cut it down for a user whom I am supporting in IRC currently).


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