I don't think it's controversial to say that top-tier SoundFont support hasn't been a huge priority for Image-Line -- which is fine! I imagine the vast majority of their userbase doesn't use them much at all, and there's only so much developer manpower to go around. But having dealt with the various problems posed by each iteration of the stock Fruity SoundFont Player for years on end, I decided sometime last year that enough was enough, and dove into the FL plugin SDK and SoundFont spec to work on a solution.
After a lot of work, I'm proud to present SFLT (pronounced "svelte"): a new SoundFont player for FL Studio (and more recently VST3/CLAP as well), built from the ground up for ease of use, reliability, and with the needs of power users in mind.
(NOTE: This video is from the initial v0.1 release - see below for the plugin's current UI.)
Current feature set includes:
- File & preset browsers with sorting and filtering options (no more staring at a giant list of presets that fills your whole screen!)
- Tight FL integration (support for slide notes, per-note panning, legato, etc.)
- Linear resampling that matches the legacy SoundFont Player's audio quality (and a Nearest mode as well, for extra crunch)
- Fully-fledged multitimbral mode, supporting different SoundFonts, patches, and parameters for each note colour
- Plenty of other little QoL features, and regularly receiving updates based on user feedback
- Written in Rust (using a heavily modified fork of the FL SDK bindings), with source code available under GPLv3
- Currently supports FL Studio 12 onwards (32-bit/64-bit Windows only)
- Built-in Reverb and Chorus modules
- Support for more obscure SF2 features (linked modulators in particular)
- Automatic DPI scaling (though you can manually adjust the window scaling in the plugin settings)
- Whatever else people would like to see to improve their workflows, within reason
- Support for older FL versions
- macOS...? Big maybe.
I tried to match the UI layout of Fruity SoundFont Player for the sake of making it as familiar as possible to existing FL SoundFont users. I hope that's not an issue to the folks over at Image-Line, but please let me know if it is -- I'm not trying to step on any toes here!
Also, please note that SFLT is currently in public BETA, and although I do my best to ensure stability and polish, you may experience synthesis errors, bugs, crashes, and the like. That said, quite a few people have been using it in their workflows for a while now, and the response has been very positive!
You can get SFLT for free at https://estrobiologist.gumroad.com/l/sflt, although leaving a tip to support development is always greatly appreciated! If you have any issues or requests for future additions, please let me know either here, at @estroBiologist on Twitter, or https://chording.it/ on Bluesky.