Sound Font players

[rncekel]

I'm now working (very slowly) on a large orchestral piece. As I don't want to use anything but free software, I'm having problems to get a decent sound. It seems to me that the only solution for many instruments is using a soundfont player. I have used them before, but not too much. Do you know wich one is best? Or are all them more or less the same?

[KrazyKatz]

Since you are looking for free, the .sf2 player that I can recommend is 'SFZ Sample Player':

http://www.project5.com/products/instruments/sfz_player/default.asp

It gets the job done and works works just fine in OMPT.

In "pay-for" products you usually have more options to adjust the envelope, volume, velocities and generally fine tune the instrument.

[Nahkranoth]

This is the best free sf player, but there are some soundfonts with modulated resonance or something, and SFZ can't play them correctly, you can hear something like bird tweet. I have a bunch of these, one of them called molecula.sf2 if someone interested.
But there is VSTSynthFont. It is capable of loading SF2 and DLS banks and I don't know of any other VST which can load DLS, but it can be buggy on certain systems. So it's good to have them both