RIP SolMiRe + A Bold but Uncertain Musical Future
A follow-up to my previous entry: So, I compose in MIDI, as opposed to live performances. In fact, lacking a live performance recording setup, I exclusively compose in MIDI, though in the future I will be able to do both.
I transcribe my music in the paid version of NoteWorthy Composer (Version 2) (I actually need to upgrade to their latest!). But this is strictly a MIDI sequencer, and sound playbacks come through the system MIDI sample library on Joshiba. In other words, Noteworthy is generally good for composing, but not great for listening.
For 15 years or more, longer than I've even had Joshiba, I have augmented this by using free online soundfonts. These soundfonts are generally a huge step up from system MIDI sounds. All of my published music (e.g., The Melted Icicle), and Curious Score music such as Pondering) uses a soundfont to upgrade the raw MIDI file with compelling recordings of live instruments and synthesizers.
These free online soundfonts, of course, are necessarily limited, their sample libraries being only a few megabytes in size and their quality being further compressed out of bandwidth considerations. They have few or no controls for velocity (fast or slow notes), dynamics (volume), articulations, timbral expressions, etc. So it's really pretty bottom-floor in terms of sound libraries. It's better than MIDI (that's actually not strictly true, as there are some MIDI sound libraries, especially back in the old days, that had some very groovy sounds, but it is generally true), but it's not good enough for, say, professional music production.
To me, the chief value of these online soundfonts was their ability to get me closer to objectively "hearing" my own music. I hear my music in my head to a great extent, but it usually gets lost in my own limitations as a composer and sound engineer, and (more to the point) because of the low quality of the MIDI sounds. Likewise, these soundfonts were very hit or miss, and I spent a great deal of time trying out a given piece of music in different soundfonts to see which suited the composition best, and then further sequencing the MIDI file to optimize for that soundfont. This was always especially important for dynamics and timbre, the former requiring significant editing in the composition to the volume on each instrument and the latter effectively dictating which instruments were allowed to be used for a given composition in a given soundfont (as some instruments would sound good and others not). For example, my first Curious Score release, The Village of Ieik, ended up sounding best in Merlin Vienna 3, with extensive modifications to the volume on each instrument, and further defining the arrangement itself as outlined in this old journal entry.
There have been a number of sources for these free online soundfonts over the years, but most of them are pretty sus, and (with a few extremely rare situational exceptions in the old days) I have only ever personally used two sites:
The first was HamieNET. Even though it only had five soundfonts available, I got some really good quality out of choosing my font carefully and optimizing for it, as evidenced by this old, unfinished piece, Sea Jig, from the late 2000s. The samples on there (i.e., the contribution from the soundfont) are surprisingly good, especially for a free online source in the 2000s. (And if you're wondering why my composition features bandoneon and clarinet so prominently, now you know! The sound font I used had a really good sound on those instruments. (Well, that, but also it wasn't uncommon at all for an accordion-type instrument to show up in seaboat music, and I had been inspired to create the piece in the first place by listening to the soundtrack of The Little Mermaid-whose fireworks scene features, in its opening moments, one of my favorite passages of orchestral music of all time (and indeed one of my favorite cinematic moments of all time), which I feel like I did at least some measure of justice to at the beginning of my composition. And if you listen toward the end of my piece, you can hear that I had transcribed part of the subsequent jig section of the piece into my own composition for inspiration; I was gradually replacing it with my own accompaniment melodies, but I never finished the piece so the original Little Mermaid motif remains! But I digress!! (But before I un-digress, you can hear the aurally superior, original version of the fireworks sequence from The Little Mermaid in raw soundtrack form here (and you can infer the rest of the soundtrack by using the file naming scheme), which is sadly in mono but doesn't have the rebalancing issues of the remastered version that drown out a bunch of the instruments.))
The point being, HamieNET was a great option, as it sounded good enough to bring my music alive and helped forestall the need for my chronically poor ass to buy my own sound library.
At some point HamieNET disappeared, and, during my years on the Mountain, I found another good source: SolMiRe. SolMiRe had over a dozen sound libraries, and added more over time. Virtually all of my published music that you will have heard was converted from MIDI using a SolMiRe-based online soundfont. I was particularly enamored of Merlin Vienna 3, but other good options included Chorium, Cadenza, Magic SF2, Unison, and Saphyr 2000, which occasionally had their moments in the Sun depending on my arrangement.
I used SolMiRe no farther back than for my Project 22 at the end of 2020, and possibly even in early 2021. But last year it went offline. It would do that sometimes, but time always saw the server problems fixed and service restored. In the meantime, I discovered that HamieNET had returned! However, it was a much degraded version of its old self, at least in terms of the quality of the conversations it did. It still had the same soundfonts available, but they produced a markedly inferior sound both with respect to SolMiRe and to old-school HamieNET itself. I was quite bummed about that!
Even more bummed, however, was I when I learned that SolMiRe is gone for good, its URL replaced by what I assume is malware or adware. RIP SolMiRE! It was a tremendous boon to me during my time on the Mountain and for years afterward, and again forestalled the need for my ever-poor ass to buy a sound library.
But now I have the problem that, with SolMiRe gone and HamieNET reduced to a shadow of its former self, the days of free online soundfonts are basically over. Which means that I need a new solution for converting MIDI tracks into orchestrated music.
Interestingly, I actually own sound libraries now: During the pandemic, with the help of some of that government emergency relief money, I made a tough executive call to purchase several sound libraries by EastWest: their Hollywood Series libraries for brass, strings, and woodwinds, and their Gypsy library. It cost me several hundred dollars! But I don't actually have a way to use these libraries at present, because I need a much more powerful computer system, and because I don't have a modern digital audio workstation. So I need hardware and software upgrades. And, until I get them, my music composition will be limited to MIDI playbacks on Noteworthy Composer, which, as I was reminded yesterday, is a serious limitation.
So! I'm gonna have to get serious and buy that stuff. But with me hemorrhaging money at the moment from this one-month plasma deferral and also being sick in February, it's just not a responsible option right now. Which is kind of frustrating.
I transcribe my music in the paid version of NoteWorthy Composer (Version 2) (I actually need to upgrade to their latest!). But this is strictly a MIDI sequencer, and sound playbacks come through the system MIDI sample library on Joshiba. In other words, Noteworthy is generally good for composing, but not great for listening.
For 15 years or more, longer than I've even had Joshiba, I have augmented this by using free online soundfonts. These soundfonts are generally a huge step up from system MIDI sounds. All of my published music (e.g., The Melted Icicle), and Curious Score music such as Pondering) uses a soundfont to upgrade the raw MIDI file with compelling recordings of live instruments and synthesizers.
These free online soundfonts, of course, are necessarily limited, their sample libraries being only a few megabytes in size and their quality being further compressed out of bandwidth considerations. They have few or no controls for velocity (fast or slow notes), dynamics (volume), articulations, timbral expressions, etc. So it's really pretty bottom-floor in terms of sound libraries. It's better than MIDI (that's actually not strictly true, as there are some MIDI sound libraries, especially back in the old days, that had some very groovy sounds, but it is generally true), but it's not good enough for, say, professional music production.
To me, the chief value of these online soundfonts was their ability to get me closer to objectively "hearing" my own music. I hear my music in my head to a great extent, but it usually gets lost in my own limitations as a composer and sound engineer, and (more to the point) because of the low quality of the MIDI sounds. Likewise, these soundfonts were very hit or miss, and I spent a great deal of time trying out a given piece of music in different soundfonts to see which suited the composition best, and then further sequencing the MIDI file to optimize for that soundfont. This was always especially important for dynamics and timbre, the former requiring significant editing in the composition to the volume on each instrument and the latter effectively dictating which instruments were allowed to be used for a given composition in a given soundfont (as some instruments would sound good and others not). For example, my first Curious Score release, The Village of Ieik, ended up sounding best in Merlin Vienna 3, with extensive modifications to the volume on each instrument, and further defining the arrangement itself as outlined in this old journal entry.
There have been a number of sources for these free online soundfonts over the years, but most of them are pretty sus, and (with a few extremely rare situational exceptions in the old days) I have only ever personally used two sites:
The first was HamieNET. Even though it only had five soundfonts available, I got some really good quality out of choosing my font carefully and optimizing for it, as evidenced by this old, unfinished piece, Sea Jig, from the late 2000s. The samples on there (i.e., the contribution from the soundfont) are surprisingly good, especially for a free online source in the 2000s. (And if you're wondering why my composition features bandoneon and clarinet so prominently, now you know! The sound font I used had a really good sound on those instruments. (Well, that, but also it wasn't uncommon at all for an accordion-type instrument to show up in seaboat music, and I had been inspired to create the piece in the first place by listening to the soundtrack of The Little Mermaid-whose fireworks scene features, in its opening moments, one of my favorite passages of orchestral music of all time (and indeed one of my favorite cinematic moments of all time), which I feel like I did at least some measure of justice to at the beginning of my composition. And if you listen toward the end of my piece, you can hear that I had transcribed part of the subsequent jig section of the piece into my own composition for inspiration; I was gradually replacing it with my own accompaniment melodies, but I never finished the piece so the original Little Mermaid motif remains! But I digress!! (But before I un-digress, you can hear the aurally superior, original version of the fireworks sequence from The Little Mermaid in raw soundtrack form here (and you can infer the rest of the soundtrack by using the file naming scheme), which is sadly in mono but doesn't have the rebalancing issues of the remastered version that drown out a bunch of the instruments.))
The point being, HamieNET was a great option, as it sounded good enough to bring my music alive and helped forestall the need for my chronically poor ass to buy my own sound library.
At some point HamieNET disappeared, and, during my years on the Mountain, I found another good source: SolMiRe. SolMiRe had over a dozen sound libraries, and added more over time. Virtually all of my published music that you will have heard was converted from MIDI using a SolMiRe-based online soundfont. I was particularly enamored of Merlin Vienna 3, but other good options included Chorium, Cadenza, Magic SF2, Unison, and Saphyr 2000, which occasionally had their moments in the Sun depending on my arrangement.
I used SolMiRe no farther back than for my Project 22 at the end of 2020, and possibly even in early 2021. But last year it went offline. It would do that sometimes, but time always saw the server problems fixed and service restored. In the meantime, I discovered that HamieNET had returned! However, it was a much degraded version of its old self, at least in terms of the quality of the conversations it did. It still had the same soundfonts available, but they produced a markedly inferior sound both with respect to SolMiRe and to old-school HamieNET itself. I was quite bummed about that!
Even more bummed, however, was I when I learned that SolMiRe is gone for good, its URL replaced by what I assume is malware or adware. RIP SolMiRE! It was a tremendous boon to me during my time on the Mountain and for years afterward, and again forestalled the need for my ever-poor ass to buy a sound library.
But now I have the problem that, with SolMiRe gone and HamieNET reduced to a shadow of its former self, the days of free online soundfonts are basically over. Which means that I need a new solution for converting MIDI tracks into orchestrated music.
Interestingly, I actually own sound libraries now: During the pandemic, with the help of some of that government emergency relief money, I made a tough executive call to purchase several sound libraries by EastWest: their Hollywood Series libraries for brass, strings, and woodwinds, and their Gypsy library. It cost me several hundred dollars! But I don't actually have a way to use these libraries at present, because I need a much more powerful computer system, and because I don't have a modern digital audio workstation. So I need hardware and software upgrades. And, until I get them, my music composition will be limited to MIDI playbacks on Noteworthy Composer, which, as I was reminded yesterday, is a serious limitation.
So! I'm gonna have to get serious and buy that stuff. But with me hemorrhaging money at the moment from this one-month plasma deferral and also being sick in February, it's just not a responsible option right now. Which is kind of frustrating.