4/14/15

C64 Waveform Soundfonts

 
The SID chip of the Commodore 64 computers is an iconic piece of hardware that has stood the test of time and is still used in music today.  While chipmusic as a whole has increased in popularity no other chip really rivals the popularity of the SID chip in chipmusic and even more mainstream productions.  Plenty of emulations exist of about every chip imaginable in software but the SID is the only one I know of that is still being utilized in modern hardware synths.


Given the proliferation of C64 software these soundfonts may have limited use but sometimes just loading up a basic wave that sounds good and modifying it is a lot easier than fiddling around with a synth.  Also their are numerous sampler/synth/romplers that support loading soundfonts as oscillators or sound sources so having these will easily allow you to blend or add C64 sounds with other sound sources.  I also recently made a soundfont of the SAA-1099 Pulse wave which little-scale also provided.   From what I gather the SAA1099 was a fairly basic PSG synth that was in a number of lesser known 1980's computers.  Since it's just a basic wave soundfonts it has similar uses as the C64 soundfonts.


As with the Sega Master System FM set the samples for this soundset were generously recorded from the original hardware and provided by little-scale. I looped all the samples for the regular soundfonts and made a single soundfont file containing all the soundfonts.   Looping the Noise sample didn't go very well as it has a stutter-like effect but it sounds fairly useable so I kept it and added a noise soundfont without looping as the samples are long enough for most uses.  On the "release" soundfonts the envelope doesn't sound quite the same on each sample but rather than trying to "fix" them I left them as-is because I dunno if that's how the hardware is suppose to behave or an error, either way the release soundfonts are probably of limited use anyway.


Download Links.

C64 Waveform Soundfonts 8 mb

Download Here

C64 Waveform Soundfont Bank 11 mb

Download Here

SAA-1099 Pulse Soundfont 2 mb

Download Here

Notes.

Thanks again to little-scale for providing the quality samples.  As I mentioned in the post theirs a number of C64 emulations in VST format so I plan on doing a post on them in the future I just need to gather more information.

9 comments:

  1. Thank you kindly for these. I was about to do it myself using 8580 Re-SID emulation in VICE. This saves me a lot of work.

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  2. I've been experimenting with altering the timbres of the waveforms via CC71 and CC74 which is very similar to what I used to do on my real Commodores.
    By controlling the low-pass filter (74)and filter resonance(71), one can seriously alter the timbre of each waveform within a MIDI sequence.
    Of course, one can do the same thing in a SoundFont editor to create unique presets. Thanks again, I'm having a blast with your work. I'm not using the Release variants as I can control that better with CC72 within the sequence. I can also control the Attack Time via CC73. This seems like the way to go. Those are decent samples and I thank Little Scale for sampling the waveforms so well. Thanks also for looping them.

    Don Allen

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  3. I can't get any of these fonts to work with the latest version of Virtual Midi Synth on Windows 10. It plays a MIDI, but there's no sound. I've tried Winamp, VLC Player and Windows Media Player, and an old game that supports MIDI. I have about 10 other fonts I already use that work fine. I'm not sure what to do. Any help would be greatly appreciated. :)

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    Replies
    1. I'd recommend Synthfont player

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    2. thanks :) will check it out

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  4. Good job on the bank, man! It sounds accurate to c64 technology. You and your friend should be proud!

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  5. i can download the bottom 2 links, but at the top, the "c64 waveform soundfonts" makes me ask for access :(

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