JaZMan PRO GM-24 Bit Soundfont review

The JaZMan PRO GM is a commercial 24-bit General MIDI soundfont, one of the few commercial GM sample sets that is still sold.

The soundfont is available from gmsoundfont DOT com for US$69.95.

Payment, download, and installation

After payment, a download link is immediately given.  The download is a 159 MB rar file.  The rar archive contains a few text files, a PDF instruments list, and...an executable installer.  Using an installer for this is rather odd, since a soundfont is just a sf2 file that can easily be moved around; an installer isn't really necessary.  But anyway, the soundfont is installed by running the exe.  The soundfont's final uncompressed size is 259 MB.  After that, the soundfont can be copied to wherever you wish on the computer.  The installation folder also has an uninstaller, although I doubt anyone would need to use that.

Loading the soundfont

The soundfont can be loaded into any sf2-compatible program, such as CoolSoft VirtualMIDISynth and BASSMIDI driver (CoolSoft actually uses the BASSMIDI library).

Using the soundfont

So, I loaded the soundfont into the CoolSoft MIDI synth driver, and proceeded to play MIDI files; MIDIs from games like DOOM, MIDI music of songs from movies and the like, and my own MIDI files that I have previously composed.

Sound quality and instruments

The soundfont overall sounds pretty nice.  The melodic instruments are fine, and the drums are solid and heavy.  The samples are 24-bit quality, unlike the quality from regular 16-bit soundfonts.  The soundfont has the 128 GM instruments, plus the drumkits.

The instruments are from various sources, and many are probably original and created by the soundfont's author(s).  The fact that it uses samples from different sources may cause some slight imbalance with some instruments, but the instruments generally all play well together.

Some of the instruments use free samples.  The overdrive and distortion guitars, for example, use some Fender Strat and Garcia Distortion samples respectively.

For some reason, I encountered a problem with the Square instrument.  It sounds screwed up in this soundfont; it wasn't looping properly/kept cutting out, and would only play one note at a time.  At first I thought that it was a problem with the BASSMIDI library...  However, it's because the soundfont has the Square instrument set to monophonic, making it rather unusable.  Fortunately, I just had to edit the soundfont with Awave Studio to fix it. (Awave Studio is not free, but there is a free alternative soundfont editor called Polyphone.)

Also, the Square instrument is actually the one from another commercial soundfont, the GeneVoice GM64Pro.  After listening to some more samples, there are other instruments borrowed from the GM64Pro soundfont.  Some of the synth instruments...  It doesn't really matter though; just about all GM soundfonts use a few samples borrowed from other sources.

Overall, the GM sound is pretty good, even though there are a few issues that need to be fixed.

Pros

• Nice sound and instruments quality
• 24-bit samples
• Good for use in composing General MIDI music

Cons

• GM-only (no GS variation instruments)
• Some instruments need fixing (the soundfont can be edited in Awave Studio or Polyphone).  Credit goes to kode54 on KVR forums for finding many of these issues:
  - Square has "key group exclusion", causing it to be monophonic.
  - Synth Voice (000:054, a.k.a. Vox) sounds strange/unpleasant (out of tune?).  This seems to be an issue with the samples themselves and cannot be fixed (except by completely replacing them with different samples).
  - Square and Bass & Lead are too loud (Square should be attenuated from 10 dB to 36 dB, Bass & Lead should be attenuated from 10 dB to 24 dB).
  - Fiddle and Viola are 1 octave too high (their regions need to be shifted up one octave, then the samples' root keys).
  - Synth Drum is 2 octaves too low.
• Price is a bit high, in my opinion.