It's a big gamble to buy sound packs from eBay. Often times it's a mostly samples you can find elsewhere or you see the same products sold by different people. Or the sounds just don't sound as good as they promise.

I took a gamble on some sondfonts beging sold by an eBay seller named "recordingselite"

The description promised to deliver ALL of the patches of a Roland Fantom X6 multi-note and multi-velocity sampled. Too good to be true? Read on...

The price is kind of higher than what I would want to pay at $69 but I think compared to a real Fantom this is not expensive and it's a lot of work to capture every patch in a mutisampled way even with automated tools. I respect that.

I use the Buy Now button and to order a copy. Actually I also ordered the  Triton Extreme set too but havent even loaded them as of the writing of this review.

A week later I get 11 DVDs and as I am copying the 35+ GB to my audio drive I realize I'm going to run out of space.... :) My entire soundfont collection prior to this was about 50 gigs and that took me almost 10 years to collect. Be sure you have the space before odering these sounds as I was scrambline to find room.

The DVD comes with a VST capable of importing and playing the soundfonts, but I prefer to use just the soundfonts with the FL Soundfont player so I didn't install it.

Let's get down to the real meat and potatoes....


The Good

Quality is excellent on these bad boys. These are some of the nicest soundfonts I have ever heard. SoundFonts can't compete as well as some of the other more modern samplers as far as features, but I use them extensively and know their weaknesses.

They are multi-sampled which means many notes across the keyboard were recorded and mapped to minimize the degrading quality when mapping a sound up and down the note range.

They are also multi-velocity at 3 levels. This means that they were recorded at a low, medium and high key pressure. So low notes sound softer and higher velocity notes sound harder.

OMG there are so many sounds on here. I may never get around to hearing all of them because there are so many. The Pianos, Guitars and Strings are all very usable and I will be using them a lot.

Sounds are not looped but are sampled at a length adequate for most tempos. I did not find any sounds that cut off prematurely


The Bad

There is one major standout problem that I need to let you guys know about. The soundfonts only go as low as C3. Internally it says the samples are as low as C2 but for me they only map as low as C3. This is for every patch. So bass sounds, guitar, piano etc that need to be played at the lower octaves won't work. (results may be diff when
using the VST that comes with it)

There are a few minor issue that only effect a few of the presets. First, some of the velocity levels are set too low. This is most eveident in some of the guitar patches that play bends at high velocity values. They play at a lower velocity than they should and makes playing them realtime difficult. This is easy enough to fix post recording the score by manually editing them but it is a pain.

Second, some samples are offset by silence. You might play a note and it plays no sound for a few hundred milliseconds. I have inspected the raw samples inside the soundfont and can see that they were recorded with this silence at the beginning of the sample. These are not common but they do exist.

Most of these problems are fixable with a soundfont editor like Vienna. I have made a few corrections for my own use and everything is cool.

The Ugly

Sequenced/Arpegiated presets are not tempo sync'ed. To handle this, you would need timestretch and this not a capability of the soundfont specification. This is not a negative point, it's just how it is so expect that up front.


The Conclusion

Would I buy again knowing all this? Yes.

You might think the price is high, but really you are paying pennies per soundfont. And there is a lot of time and effort in creating this pack.

Overall I am very happy with the purchase. Of course I would have like some of the problems I mentioned to not be there but luckily I know how to fix them so I can deal with it. And let me be clear, with the exception of the "no notes below C3" gripe, only a minimal number of presets are effected by the other problems.

The sounds are amazing and a few of them will be "go to" sounds for me.

Since the price and quality means most to me and I do know how to correct some of the issues with these sounds, I gave it a better score than I normally would have.

Warbeats Rating: 8/10


You can see recordingselite's eBay page here: http://myworld.ebay.com/recordingselite/

I am not a lawyer and I don't know.

On one hand, if you own the hardware you should be able to use the sounds as you see fit. I see drum kits sampled all the time 808, 909 etc and the same rule should apply to them as they are also hardware. I also see commercial libraries for other keyboards like Mellotron, VIRUS, JUNO etc..

On the other hand, I could see where someone might ask this question.

You will NOT get the same quality from this collection as the real thing. There are many advanced features and FX that can be applied in the real Fantom that you cannot reproduce without it.

i bought the Motif ES6 Reason Refill from the same seller..

the sounds are GREAT.. the best quality sounds ive ever heard (as a reason refill).
all samples have too much release (easy fixable: just turn down the release button).
the "only sampled as low as C3"-problem is easy fixable, too!
a couple samples have some dead space at the beggining so they don't start with pushing the key(fixable too)

still i would buy them again

very good review NFX!!