“SoundFont” is the name given by E-mu Systems/Creative Labs to their wavetable sample technology. It was originally developed for the E-mu Systems Proteus line of synthesizers and has been used in the E-mu Systems APS sound card and Creative Labs AWE, Live! and Audigy cards, as well as with third-party software synthesizers. Except for the AWE with onboard RAM, the samples are kept in system RAM.
Converters exist for translation to and from other sample formats such as Akai and GigaSampler. E-mu Systems has published the entire SoundFont 2.1 (SF2) Specification and a variety of free and low-cost utilities and tools are available for this format. Yet many of the tools require tedious and error-prone manual effort.
This project investigates some automatic conversion techniques to aid creation of professional quality SoundFont sample files from raw audio files. These techniques should be applicable to other formats as well. Utility programs for implementation include SF2Comp v1.0, Audio Compositor v4.4, and Sound Forge XP Studio v5.0. Java programming used the Java 2 System Development Kit v1.4.
In addition, some time was spent investigating the DownLoadable Sounds (DLS ) format endorsed by the MIDI Manufacturers Association. They have also specified an eXtensible Music File (XMF) format allowing both MIDI and samples to be included in the same file.