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Topic: Sound Fonts in Notebooks (Read 5179 times) previous topic - next topic

Sound Fonts in Notebooks

I have a Toshiba A65 Notebook and have no special sound card. Can I use Sound Fonts with NWC in my Notebook without need of buying a new external set? Or sound card?

Re: Sound Fonts in Notebooks

Reply #1 –
You surely can use NWC - but you won't hear anything... To hear something, you always need a sound "card", be it a PCI card or equivalent, or a chip integrated on your motherboard.

You can always save your compositions as MIDI files. Then you can use SynthFont, for instance, to turn the MIDI's into waveform audio with the help of SoundFonts.

Alternatively, you can bring the compositions to a computer that has a sound card, and either play the MIDI files in any media player that has MIDI support (such as WMP, Winamp, Timidity etc., Timidity supports SoundFonts too) or use NWC files in NWC Viewer.

Re: Sound Fonts in Notebooks

Reply #2 –
The way I interpret the question, it is: the laptop has a built-in sound 'card' plus speakers, but nothing fancy. And then the question still is: can you use sound fonts on that? (unfortunately, I do not know the answer)

Re: Sound Fonts in Notebooks

Reply #3 –
OK - as long as there is some means of getting sound out of your PC, you can always use SynthFont (and Timidity, but that's not too easy) to produce waveforms (WAV's, MP3's etc.).

Just save the NWC compositions as MID files and play or convert them using SynthFont.

Re: Sound Fonts in Notebooks

Reply #4 –
Creative have released a PCMCIA Audigy ZS Notebook Soundcard which should allow the use of Soundfonts.

Unfortunately it only provides Line In, Mic In and Audio out - no MIDI connections.
You would need a USB MIDI connection to attach a keyboard.

Another alternative to soundfonts is to use the Yamaha SYXG50 Soft Synth as long as you don't intend to play live and you can tolerate the latency.

You will find a source for this software in the discussion on "Classical Guitar Sounds" in this forum.
 

Re: Sound Fonts in Notebooks

Reply #6 –
If you have a computer with decent RAM and CPU of at least 1GhZ processor speed, the Yamaha SYXG-50 has virtually no latency, less than 8ms or so.