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Q: How long did it take to create the Utopia SoundFont?
We spent 1.5 years on developing Utopia Live! of which around
half a year was spent on testing and further finetuning the soundfont.
Q: What are some of the sound sources which you have used to create
the instruments in the SoundFont?
There are three sources we used to obtain samples:
- we sampled most of the samples from the line-out of various synthesizers
- some sounds were sampled from real (non synthesizer) instruments
- some samples are generated by FM synthesis
Q: Did you make use of the SoundFonts that came with the Sound Blaster
Live! card?
No. Utopia Live! sounds unique and no single sample comes
from another soundfonts.
Q: Did you constantly have to fight with the RAM space limitation that
plagues most users?
Our aim was that Utopia Live! should work on a system with
64 MB RAM. Since the official soundfont size limit is 32 MB this and 31.5
MB is the largest piece of RAM one can reserve for soundfonts on a 64
MB system the target size of Utopia Live! was put at 31.5 MB RAM. During
the last half year of development the size of Utopia Live! always was
somewhere between 30 and 37 MB in size. By constantly replacing old samples
with new beter ones and by optimising looppoints even further we were
able to litterally squeeze an extreme amount of sampledata in 31.5 MB.
Q: Were there any special features in the EMU10K1 engine that you used
to keep the footprint of the SoundFont down?
Everything in Utopia Live! was developed specifically to
be used with the SB Live!. I'll give some examples of this:
- The samples are optimised to be as small as possible, taking full
advantage of the SB Live!'s 8 point interpolation. Using the same samples
on other soundcards would have very poor results. Because of this and
extremely optimised looppoints where were able to put in things like
a stereo percussion set.
- The 64 polyphony offered by the EMU10K1 DSP is greatly utilized to
to do some fancy multilayering which enabled us to build some incredible
instruments. The way we used multiple layers is impossible on any other
low/mid range priced soundcard currently available. Even though other
cards (e.g. the Terratec EWS64 (DREAM9407 DSP based) and the Vortex2
range of soundcards) offer 64 or more polyphony for MIDI no card even
comes close to managing them the way the EMU10K1 DSP does.
- Utopia Live! was developed with specific reverb/chorus settings (25%
for reverb and 20% for chorus) which have to be set in the Environmental
Audio controls. Using 'static' values enabled us to get a much more
'life' in the instruments. When not using a 'static' reverb/chorus setting
like most other soundfonts do you can't 'fine tune' a soundfont as much
as when you are able to when you know exactly how the customer will
hear the soundfont. Another reason for using static reverb/chorus settings
is that when using multiple layers in combination with specific chorus/reverb
settings from within the soundfont has a serious impact on the loudness
level. The resulting level of loudness is unpredictable and thus not
using a 'static reverb/chorus' setting would result in a less balanced
soundfont both in terms of loudness levels and with things things like
sustain/release values.
- Utopia Live! is optimized to work around specific bugs in the LiveWare
2.x (and newer) drivers to produce a better sound. In some cases bugs
were even used as a 'feature'. One example: By using specific filter
settings and using samples with a certain minimum samplerate you can
disable the velocity-to-filter curve. What is the use of this ? Well
the velocity-to-filter curves applies a filters over the played sounds.
The lower the velocity level at which the instrument is played, the
stonger a filter is applied to the sound. This is good and bad. It's
good because it kind of simulates velocity sensitivity. It's bad because
it takes away some of the clearity of the sound at lower loudness levels
and because it causes the loudness level to decrease much faster than
on other MIDIs devices like the Roland SoundCanvas. The result could
be almost unhearable dirty sounding strings with some MIDI files that
sound great with a Roland SoundCanvas (the GM/GS standard for MIDI).
When you disable this velocity-to-filter curve this problem disappears
and you can have beautifull stereo strings at low loudness levels.
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