Howdy Fred,

I'm glad you got it figured out It can get confusing when you have so many filetypes flying around! I've been working on a project of some "sing along" songs for my aunts and uncles, and going back and forth with one of my aunts (it's a secret to the rest of them for now) about some of the songs and how they should be played, and so forth, and I finally had to set up an Excel spread sheet with all my annotations and such to keep straight what I'd done and what I needed to do where to what files!

As for soundfonts, not all soundcards are able to use them. However, if you find that you'd like to work with them, you can use Composer to set up your music file, and then use a free program called SynthFont (www.synthfont.com) to play the file using soundfonts. SynthFont is only a player, but it does have the ability to render files to a format that you can put on an audio CD, as well as the ability to add real acoustic effects (such as reverb, chorus, EQ, etc) to each track or a sub bus (selection) of tracks. And the cool thing is, that a lot of the effects are to be had for free

I've written a blurb about soundfont usage, including SynthFont, in the section of the forum about "third party software" if you want to take a look. You've already heard a bit of the difference that a soundfont can make with the sax. If you want to hear some more, you can listen to the different versions of "Communion Aire" on my SoundClick site. I also did "Aaron's Meditation" solely with soundfonts. "Beanfield Winter" has a really cool soundfont "pad", but the really nice oboe is Garritan Personal Orchestra.

A soundfont is sort of like having different "makes" or "brands" of the same instrument available (as well as pads and combos that some folks have made). Different ones may sound better for different applications, so it's nice to have the choice. Another nice thing is that there are a lot of good ones that are free

ttfn,
Sherry