I've received a few questions from users about cache size and
large soundfonts, so here's some information on the issue:
The SBLive must have a cache at least equal to the size of the soundfont to be
loaded. I've found that on my system, making the cache about 15% larger than the soundfont
helps stability.
The size of the cache is limited to no more than 50% of the installed system
RAM. On a system with 64MB, this limits you to 32MB cache - not enough for PC311! PC311
runs fine on a 128MB system.
Memory allocated to the cache is still available to applications - it's not
actually used until you load a soundfont, and then only an amount of memory equal to the
soundfont size is used, so setting the cache 15% over doesn't cost memory.
For some who have been following comments on these pages or
had problems downloading and decompressing sfArk files from this site, or others, I
thought I'd share my own experiences.
Like others, I had problems decompressing sfArk files downloaded from a number
of sites. These problems were:
After some time suffering with this problem, I stumbled across the fact that if
I used Internet Explorer instead of Netscape Communicator to download the file, it would
download and I would be able to correctly decompress the file. I posted some suggestions
on my site, advising anyone who wanted the sfArk files there to use Internet Explorer to
download them.
I then was contacted by the author of the sfArk utility who had himself been
contacted by users who were having these problems with files from Personal Copy. He saw
that I had at least partially addressed the issue, and he and I then ran a series of tests
to define what was going wrong.
The tests we ran consisted of renaming sfArk files from my server, and
downloading them to my PC and attempting decompression. What we found was that if the
sfArk file had an extension of *.bin (normally meaning it's a binary file) or *.exe
(always a binary file), Netscape would download it as a binary file, and it would
correctly decompress. If the file extension was left as sfArk, the file appears to be
treated as an ASCII file and downloaded as ASCII, which corrupts the binary file
structure, rendering the file useless. If you've just spent a couple of hours connected
trying to get a big soundfont, only to find out the file is useless, you have every reason
to be upset.
Initial solutions discussed included zipping the sfArk file so that the browser
downloads as a binary ZIP file. My concern with this approach is that, as mentioned
elsewhere on this site, WinZIP, which is a very popular ZIP utility, extracts an sfArk
file from a ZIP archive and truncates the file extension to *.SFA. sfArk won't recognize a
file with an SFA extension as valid, even though it probably is. Renaming sfArk files and
using a *.bin extension does work, but you have to include instructions to rename the file
back to a *.sfArk extension to decompress. If you are downloading Unison, make sure the
soundfont file is named (or renamed) Unison.sfArk before you attempt to decompress the
file.
The solution that I've implemented on this site is to store the sfArk soundfont
file in a self-extracting 32bit ZIP archive created with the PKZip utility. This utility
correctly extracts the file and retains the *.sfArk file extension; is usable on any 32bit
PC operating system, and requires no special instructions to users.
All of the sfArk files on this site are now handled this way - you download the
*.exe file, double click to extract the sfArk file, select the folder where you want to
put the sfArk file, and then decompress using the sfArk utility.
If you have experienced problems on other sites getting usable sfArk files
downloaded, the best suggestion I have for you is to download with Internet Explorer, even
if your preference is Netscape.
