Soundfont Static on X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro, Win7 x64

[tima2000]

I have an X-Fi Titanium Fatalty Pro running on Win7 Ultimate x64, Asus P7P55D Pro motherboard, Nvidia 9600GT, 4 GB RAM, no DPC Latency issues, and when I load a largish soundfont, e.g. 25 MB in size, I get horrible static that sounds like a machine gun the first time a note is played. After playing the note once, it seems to work fine. This happens with most every note. For example, if I load a high quality steel string guitar soundfont, every key I hit on the Soundfont Bank Manager's keyboard suffers from the static the first time it's hit. Afterwards, it's fine. The same thing happens in other programs that use MIDI that I configure to use the "SB X-FI Synth"; they start off with terrible static, and they get better as they play more and more notes. Any idea how to fix this?

[tima2000]

As a workaround, I found I could start taking advantage of my PC's ability to reliably enter and resume from sleep, a feature I've never used on a desktop PC. However, to get it to sleep automatically, I had to use "powercfg -requestsoverride" to override the X-Fi's continuous request to prevent the computer from idling to sleep. I've noticed my onboard audio driver enters a request only when playing something, deleting it when finished. The request is always there for the X-Fi. Anyway, this seems to preserve the MIDI state so that the sounds are not distorted when I resume. It's weird, because looking at disk I/O in Sysinternals Process Monitor, the driver loads the soundfont all at once, and playing notes incurs no I/O. Maybe it's dynamically decompressing the already-loaded data or otherwise massaging it when a note is first played, and large samples are causing it to distort?

[tima2000]

Anyone?

Are soundfonts just dead technology?

[tima2000]

I ended up dumping the X-Fi and using free software like Synthfont and LoopBe.

[squall_leonhart]

well known issue, feel free to try the new Bassmididrv which is superior to synthfont,

[awetoy]

Thanks squall_leonhart for responding to these old soundfont issues left unresolved by the developers.. I am also having this problem on Win 7/64 with my X-Fi Titanium. Any advice for fixing it -- besides switching to soft synths?
If it's a "known issue" (thanks to the pathetic state of the MIDI/soundfont drivers for this card), perhaps there is a known workaround for it.. ?

[squall_leonhart]

theres no known workarounds, a moderator here has been in touch with an older, and no longer existing thread where the issue was reported but no further contact was made on creatives front.