The final release version of Quicktime 5 is now available from Apple. All the bugs which were present in the three previous beta versions seem to have been fixed, and there are a couple of nice new features. The instrument picker dialog (which is what you get when you tell BarFly to add an instrument to the instrument menu) is now better laid out, with the Roland GS instruments on the same category menus as the General Midi set, and QT5 now supports SoundFonts. SoundFonts have been around on the PC for a while and there are lots of them available on the net. You can add new instruments by downloading them (in soundfont2 format) and placing the files in the Quicktime Preferences folder. One problem at the moment is that soundfonts (which are huge) are normally distributed compressed in one of two formats, .sfpack or .sfArk. I haven't yet been able to locate a Mac program which will decompress these, although the suppliers of the freeware SFPack program, Megota Software <http://www.megota.com/> say that they are working on both Mac and Linux versions. In the mean time you will need access to a PC unpack them. A couple of disadvantages with QT5 are that the secret sound editor in QT Player Pro has been removed, and if you have paid for the Pro version your serial number won't work, and you'll have to shell out another $30. This only applies to the Quicktime Player though, BarFly doesn't need the paid-for version. Get it from: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/index.html Note that the standalone version requires Stuffit Expander version 6 to unpack it; you can get that from: http://www.aladdinsys.com Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
