To be fair, they did add tons of their own code on top of it. Just like you can add code to a BSD project and relicense your fork under GPL. (It's hilariously ironic when BSD fanbois complain about the latter though.)
Both licenses have their place.
Dubai has a western like culture and is very tolerant of westerners.
That's the kind of misconception that gets you arrested for kissing in public.
I used to post on those forums years ago
The reason I still care about soundfonts is that I sometimes write music for fun. I don't have any of the expensive VSTs, and some of the cheaper VSTs (like Garritan Pocket Orchestra) frankly sound worse than a good free soundfont.
Otherwise MIDI files are mostly a nostalgia thing - although they can be useful as a format for moving data between different music programs. E.g. Cakewalk to MuseScore.
Glad it works for you! And yes, SynthFont is meant for more than just playing, it can render to wave/mp3 etc.
I haven't tried it myself yet, but I just found this guide to using Timidity++ driver in Windows, which should allow you to use soundfonts with your normal midi player (e.g. Windows Media Player):
Unfortunately nobody has yet come up with a simple free SoundFont compatible Windows midi driver.
Haha, upon further searching it looks like someone has done exactly that. This page explains it all: http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=5346
You don't need hardware soundfont support because modern CPUs can do that with one hand behind their back. However, the MS software synth doesn't support custom soundfonts and its samples aren't exactly spectacular.
There are plenty of free apps to play MIDIs or render them to wave/mp3 - I've experimented with everything from SynthFont, FluidSynth, to midi loopback cable + VST hosts + SFZ+ combinations. Unfortunately nobody has yet come up with a simple free SoundFont compatible Windows midi driver. Something like a combination of LoopBe1's midi out port with FluidSynth. Unfortunately LoopBe1 isn't open source
True dat.
Before I got married I did most of my sleeping on a cot in the computer room and I can honestly say that, in regards to sleep, the hum of servers is as good as rain on a tin roof.
Lilypond is the only good open-source alternative I know of, but it isn't WYSIWYG, and I don't know of a free WYSIWYG music notation program with high quality output, i.e., the kind that a professional musician would like to use.
Musescore (cross-platform) and Rosegarden (Linux only) are GUI score editors that automatically export to LilyPond for rendering.
For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!
