Hi Djim,
I forgot that I only posted the Soundclick link to the piece. I think my memory is taking frequent vacations. I'll enclose the piece here as a .not, which has to be zipped.
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For the gong, I used the Roland tam tam, btw.
The more direct way you have to use Composer and Synthfont without having to switch back and forth sounds great. Sounds like a much easier way to have effectively 32 channels. But I'm two dumb to really understand how it works.
Anyhow, regarding the pfft. I used sound font librarian to remove the percussion from Merlin My_Own and insert the one from Merlin Creative. Loaded this into my synth and there was no pffft problem playing the Prelude as a .not file. I also tried several other files, with a lot more timpani and cymbals. Same thing; no pfffft.
Later, I will try doing the same thing with Vienna, Gold, and Orchestra, as well as some other soundfonts I tried but still got the pffft.
I think with your set up, you won't hear the pffft, whichever soundfonts you use.
all best,
mgj