Default soundfont

[Splendide-Imaginarius]

The recommendation for GMGSx.sf2 seems to come from Ancurio#92.

The forum link cited in that issue (which purportedly claims the font is public-domain) is dead (also not in Wayback Machine), and searching https://www.synthfont.com/phpBB3/ for "public domain" doesn't yield any obviously relevant results. SynthFont doesn't seem to be FLOSS. https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/841 seems to claim that this soundfont is actually under a CC BY license, though I'm not sure where they got that info (and AFAICT the license metadata on that site is of dubious quality).

@RyanBram do you have any sourcing for the license info?

Is there any reason why we should use GMGSx.sf2, as opposed to (for example) one of the various soundfonts packaged in Debian? Thoughts @Ancurio?

[RyanBram]

I can't show you any evidence other than the forum link I included when I informed Ancurio, but it seems to be inaccessible now due to migration to another forum software.

When I referred to the forum, GMGSx.sf2 was provided directly by Kenneth Rundt author of Synthfont, where he said that he planned to include it when SynthFont 2 was released. He explicitly stated that it was Public Domain, which I'm sure Ancurio as the author of MKXP would be very cautious about trusting me if my reference was inaccurate.

Of course, I can't prove my claim above other than by asking yourself the author of SynthFont directly about the license of GMGSx.sf2.

And of course, even if he states public domain, further proof is needed whether he did not include proprietary samples when making it.

Related to this you can see in this discussion:
https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/112333-this-is-woof-1200-sep-15-2023/?page=72

Another way is to check the .sf2 file directly using SF2 editor like Viena or Polyphone where you might be able to find the license or metadata there.

Is there any reason why we should use GMGSx.sf2, as opposed to (for example) one of the various soundfonts packaged in Debian? Thoughts @Ancurio?

My personal reason is:

1. Fairly small in size
2. Close enough in term of quality with default gm.dls from Windows, since the purpose of MKXP is to be as close as possible with real RPG Maker series.

[RyanBram]

Update:
Opening this as text file will show the header as Public Domain:
https://mapleshrine.eu/unsorted/GMGSx.sf2

So, if it is checked by Viena or Polyphone, you'll eventually found it.

[Splendide-Imaginarius]

Opening this as text file will show the header as Public Domain:

Thanks, I can confirm this. So yes, the author of the soundfont clearly is of the opinion that it's public domain. That's good enough for me; given that he's distributing it with commercial software, if he were infringing someone else's license, I'd expect them to have complained by now.

Close enough in term of quality with default gm.dls from Windows, since the purpose of MKXP is to be as close as possible with real RPG Maker series.

I briefly did an experiment today, where I took a royalty-free track used in a commercial RPG Maker game, which is distributed by the composer in both MIDI and Vorbis format. I rendered the MIDI to FLAC with GMGSx as well as all the soundfonts in Debian, and compared each of the resulting FLAC files to the Vorbis distributed by the composer. GMGSx sounded the closest to me. So that would suggest (albeit with a sample size n=1) that GMGSx is not only closest to Windows's MIDI rendering, but also closest to the intent of what RPG Maker game composers want their music to sound like.

So yeah, I think GMGSx is a reasonable default soundfont.

Is there any reason not to include GMGSx in the mkxp-z Git repo and/or the release binaries? I believe @RyanBram suggested doing so in the original mkxp GitHub issue, and I believe at least one commonly-used mkxp fork is including it in the distributed binaries.

[Ancurio]

I think my original intention was to even bundle it inside the binary, if only fluidsynth supported loading soundfonts from memory