Re: [fluid-dev] Support for SF4 (FLAC) format?

[Tom M.]

> But I do wonder: sfconvert seems to have support for FLAC compression
> for at least three years now. Why doesn't MuseScore support SF4/FLAC
> yet?

SF3 was single-handedly driven by Werner Schweer from MuseScore, when
they were in a need to reduce the filesize of soundfonts. It seems
that further development @MuseScore starved after Werner stepped down
from the project.

https://musescore.org/en/node/20818


I do sympathize with the idea of FLAC compression. But I do not see a
reason to bump the soundfonts major version again. From my
understanding, bumping to version 3 was necessary because of the
different handling of the sample start/stop markers AND to make
implementations look up the compression flag 0x10 that was added to
SfSampleLink enum.

Everything needed to support FLAC, as far as I see, is to add a new
compression flag to SfSampleLink enum that indicates that a sample is
FLAC compressed. If a soundfont reader is compliant with Werner's SF3,
it should ignore samples that have unknown flags set. (Hard to tell
though, due to a lacking "official" SF3 spec from Werner.) So, there
is no need to bump soundfont to major version 4, to my knowledge.


Tom