Better sounds
OxiGuitar plays your scores with a sound set: a file of recorded instruments, such as a SoundFont. It never downloads one. Out of the box it plays with the set your system already has, and you can give it better ones by putting their files in a folder.
The set your system has
- Windows has one,
gm.dls, and macOS has one, in Core Audio. OxiGuitar plays with these when it finds nothing better. - Linux has one when a package installs it. On Debian and Ubuntu the
oxiguitar-plugins-basicpackage recommendsfluid-soundfont-gm(FluidR3, 148 MB) ormusescore-general-soundfont-small(MuseScore General, 40 MB), and your package manager installs one with it unless you told it not to; on Fedora it recommendsfluid-soundfont-gm. OxiGuitar looks in/usr/share/sounds/sf2,/usr/share/sounds/sf3and/usr/share/soundfonts.
These are General MIDI sets: one sound for each of the 128 standard instruments and a drum kit, small enough to come with a system. Windows’ and macOS’s are the smallest and plainest. The first time OxiGuitar gets a score ready to play with only your system’s sets (when you open it), the bottom of the window says so, once, with a link to this page.
Using a better set
Put the set’s file in the soundfonts folder beside your plugins folder (OxiGuitar creates it when it starts):
| System | The soundfonts folder |
|---|---|
| Linux | ~/.local/share/oxiguitar/soundfonts/ |
| macOS | ~/Library/Application Support/OxiGuitar/soundfonts/ |
| Windows | %APPDATA%\OxiGuitar\soundfonts\ |
With OXIGUITAR_HOME set, it is the soundfonts folder in that folder. OxiGuitar reads SoundFont 2 (.sf2), SoundFont 3 (.sf3) and Downloadable Sounds (.dls) files there, and SFZ instruments: a .sfz file with its samples (WAV, FLAC or Ogg Vorbis) in folders beside it, as their makers ship them, so put the whole unpacked folder in. It looks in folders inside it too, five levels deep, and never changes anything there.
A set in your folder plays before any of the system’s, and of several, the largest plays. To choose yourself, open Tools → Plugins…, select SoundFont and press Settings…: pick a set for electric guitars, one for acoustic guitars, one for basses, one for drums and one for everything else. The choice holds for every file. “The best found” goes back to the automatic choice, which is never an SFZ instrument (below).
A SoundFont 3 file is decoded the first time it plays, which takes a few seconds for a large set; OxiGuitar keeps the decoded copy in its cache folder, so later it loads at once. That copy can be large (216 MB for the small MuseScore General, 490 MB for the full one); deleting it is harmless.
Choosing a set for each instrument
A set made for one instrument usually sounds far better than a General MIDI set’s version of it, so you can mix: recorded guitars from one set, the bass, the drums and the rest from another. Open Tools → Plugins…, select SoundFont, press Settings…, and pick a set for each of Electric guitars, Acoustic guitars, Basses, Drums and Everything else. Electric guitars are General MIDI’s six electric sounds (jazz, clean, muted, overdriven, distortion, harmonics), acoustic guitars its nylon and steel strings, and basses its eight bass sounds; banjos and the other fretted instruments go with everything else, so they keep their own sounds. A set made for one instrument only has that instrument, so pick it only for its own row and leave a General MIDI set for the others.
SFZ instruments are listed in the same rows, as their set’s folder and their own name (“… (SFZ)”). An SFZ file is one instrument, not a set of 128, so it plays only in a row you pick it for. Many SFZ sets come with several instruments (programs) for the same recording, with different microphones or articulations: try them. OxiGuitar loads an SFZ instrument’s samples into memory, whole, when you open a score, so playing never waits for the disk; a big drum kit can take a few seconds and some gigabytes of memory. If an instrument can’t load, or some of its samples are missing, the bottom of the window says so and a General MIDI set plays instead.
Sets worth getting
All of these are free to use. Download them from their makers’ pages, unpack them if they come packed (the FreePats files are .7z: 7-Zip on Windows, The Unarchiver on macOS, p7zip on Linux), then put the .sf2 or .sf3 file in your soundfonts folder.
For everything
- FluidR3_GM (MIT licence, 148 MB): a complete General MIDI set, the best sounding of those we tried. On Linux it is the
fluid-soundfont-gmpackage. - MuseScore General (MIT licence; SoundFont 3, 86 MB, or SoundFont 2, 490 MB): MuseScore’s set, close behind. On Debian and Ubuntu:
musescore-general-soundfont(SoundFont 3) ormusescore-general-soundfont-lossless.
Guitars
FreePats’ electric guitars (CC0: free for anything, no credit needed), each from its own page on GitHub (Releases, the file with SF2 in its name):
| Set | Download | Size packed |
|---|---|---|
| Clean | electric-guitar-FSBS-clean | 129 MB (or bridge-small, 6 MB) |
| Jazz | electric-guitar-FSBS-jazz | 66 MB (or bridge-small, 5 MB) |
| Direct | electric-guitar-FSBS-direct | 60 MB |
Pick one for Electric guitars in the settings window. Direct sounds thin on its own: it is the raw signal an amp model starts from, for the amp modelling (NAM) that OxiGuitar 1.0 brings; get it for then.
Recorded guitars, basses and drums (SFZ)
These SFZ sets are the ones we recommend: we listened to every reference song with each of them, and OxiGuitar knows their layouts, so they play the score’s hammer-ons, palm mutes, dead and ghost notes with their own recorded articulations. Unpack each into your soundfonts folder as a whole folder, then pick its instrument in its row of the settings window.
| Set | Pick, in the row | Licence | Download | Size |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Black and Green Guitars by Karoryfer Lecolds: a green Gretsch Anniversary and a black Hofner Club, recorded by Brian Wood | 01-green_keyswitch (the Gretsch) or 02-black_keyswitch (the Hofner), for Electric guitars | CC0 | Releases: Karoryfer_Black_And_Green_Guitars_1000.zip | 460 MB packed, 560 MB unpacked |
| Black and Blue Basses by Karoryfer Lecolds | 01-darkblack_keysw, for Basses | CC0 | Releases: Black_And_Blue_Basses_1002.zip | 962 MB packed, 1.1 GB unpacked |
| MuldjordKit by Lars Muldjord (DrumGizmo), SFZ by kinwie: a Tama Superstar rock and metal kit | DrumGizmo MuldjordKit (in its Stereo folder), for Drums | CC BY 4.0 | its page: Code → Download ZIP | 340 MB |
Get the two Karoryfer sets from their Releases, the file named in the table, not with Code → Download ZIP or git clone: their repositories ask git to treat every file as text, which corrupts the samples in those copies. The MuldjordKit has no releases, and its Download ZIP is fine.
The keyswitched programs (…_keyswitch, …_keysw) are the ones with every articulation: pick those. Black and Green’s other programs and Black and Blue’s single-articulation programs play too, without the score’s effects on their own samples. Hear them together on the Hear it page.
The MuldjordKit is under CC BY 4.0: if you publish music made with it, credit Lars Muldjord and the DrumGizmo team. Karoryfer’s sets need no credit.
Other SFZ sets
Any SFZ instrument plays. Ones OxiGuitar has no layout for play their notes as they are, palm mutes and dead notes ended early, hammer-ons carrying on the ringing string. OxiGuitar also knows the layouts of SM Drums, Naked Drums (its own programs) and Karoryfer’s Big Rusty, Swirly and Unruly Drums, so their drums play at the right keys; we found the MuldjordKit the most natural of these.