A free soundfont player for Mac OS X, yes you can !

Hi there !

Maybe you need a free soundfont player for mac ?

I've recently decided to reopen and use my soundfont sample libraries on my mac. Well the thing is, there are not so many options if you want to use a free soundfont player for mac. In fact I have only found one reliable solution. Moreover, it is not for me a fully satisfying solution.

At the beginning, my students (again...) asked me where they could find some free virtual instruments they could use with ProTools.
I told them what I know about it, and after that I realised I omitted to tell them about sf2 files... In fact most of them wanted to use "realistic sounds" which means acoustic instruments (considering the fact that they don't want to use loops, but want to "play" them and build their music and sound design with these virtual instruments).
For most of my students, money is a major problem, that said they just don't want to pay anything, but want to have access to every pro features of every single audio plugin, sampler, virtual instruments...

I've considered talking them about Kontakt sampler that I think is the best actual sampler (not very expensive & very very expandable with a lot of free kontakt sounds / NKI instruments but still... Kontakt is a commercial sampler...) 
I advised them about other free stuff and then, I realised years before them, I was exactly at the same place... I told to myself "How did you get all these sounds for free ?" At that time (1995 if I remember well) I had a SoundBlaster - Live or something like... it was the very beginning of Internet & it took me half of my youth to download all the sf2 I still have somewhere on my hard drive... but years passed and soundfonts are not very popular those days. don't matter, free sf2 are still very useful when you need it !

Next problem was to find a mac os X free soundfont player...

The useful tool I suggest you to use is the bs0 from Bismarck which you can download. Its only defaults at that time are :
- AU & VST only (no RTAS development, so you can only use it with GarageBand, Logic Studio, Cubase etc... but not ProTools)
- mono only

That said it is very useful & usable.

Regarding the ProTools heck, you can use the VST wrapper from FXpansion to convert the bs0 vst plugin to RTAS (it's 75 € ex VAT) or I found a solution for the ones who would like to convert their sf2 instruments in NKI for use with Structure Free and finally import them in ProTools... It can be a little tricky but students have time... check that story right here

Peace.

Sam.

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