Although Sonar supports DXi software samplers, many musicians still prefer using a SoundBlaster Live or Audigy sound card for SoundFonts. Playing SoundFonts through a sound card's hardware has several advantages over using a software synthesizer: There's no burden on the computer's CPU, the response time (latency) is immediate, and it's one less plug-in to fiddle with. When I bought my current computer I loaded it with 512 MB of memory just so I could use multiple large SoundFonts all at once. (See my ProRec article Striving for New Lows for the details.)

I have many SoundFont files, but three of them serve as my main sound set and contain all of the instruments I use on a regular basis. Where a standard General MIDI bank has one grand piano, one finger bass, and one trombone, my SoundFonts have many variations in separate banks. For example, I have four different clavinets, five acoustic basses, three timpanis, and so forth....

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As I mentioned earlier, I used the Vienna SoundFont editor to organize the patches in my master SoundFont file. The first step was to build a series of "audition" files, so I could compare the dozens of similar instruments side by side. Vienna includes a bank manager that lets you copy patches from one SoundFont file to another, so I built one file with every clarinet, another with every electric bass, and so forth. Unfortunately, many of the instruments were programmed to play in the wrong octave. So before I could compare them, I had to transpose the Coarse Pitch for those instruments up or down an octave, and then adjust the key range each sample occupies in the Instrument definition to compensate. Once I had chosen the best patches in each category, I loaded the 8 MB SoundFont that came with my Live card, and one by one replaced sounds with the better versions. In some cases I kept the original patches, if they were good, and added the new instruments to other banks. For example, I ended up with three different...

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Several months ago I was mixing a symphony I had sequenced for a local composer when I noticed the French horns were fuzzy in one channel. It was that unmistakable sound of a bad connection, the kind that goes away when you wiggle the wires. I have a fairly complex setup comprising seven external synthesizers, a computer with dozens of audio programs and two sound cards, a rack full of outboard effects, and a 48-input mixer to combine all the outputs. The fuzzing horn patch was coming from my Yamaha SY77 synthesizer, so I reached in the back and unplugged and reseated both stereo pairs of phone plugs. The fuzz was still there, so I fiddled with, in turn, the wires from the SY77 to the noise gates, the noise gates to the mixer, and the mixer to the power amp. Nothing helped, and all I could do was ignore it for the time being. By the next day, when I was finishing the mix, the fuzz had disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared. But this experience confirmed what I'd long been considering: It was time to...

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You won't see software publishers talk about it in their glossy product brochures or on their web sites. I've never seen it listed in an advertisement, and it is rarely mentioned in magazine product reviews. It affects almost everyone who buys software, yet vendors go to great lengths to avoid talking about it. I'm referring, of course, to software copy protection, the audio industry's dirty little secret. Traditionally, copy protection has been more of a burden for Mac than PC users, but I am greatly disturbed by the recent trend of PC programs to start using copy protection too. Let me state up front that I am vigorously opposed to software piracy, and my objections to copy protection are based solely on its negative impact for legitimate users. Copy protection comes in many forms, and is an attempt by manufacturers to limit the use of their software to people who actually buy it. The simplest form of protection requires you to enter a serial number when the program is first installed. In practice this protects...

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