The JEUX SoundFont can be downloaded from the HammerSound pages, where Thomas Hammer has graciously provided space for it. His collection of soundfonts and useful information about sound synthesis should be visited by everyone who is searching for high quality sound from their home computer.
The "final" version of Jeux for most purposes is 1.4. However, a few parameters are not interpreted correctly by some SoundBlaster drivers, resulting in some very strange sounds in a few stops. A version that corrects this problem is also available (version 1.4rev).
JEUX version 1.4 was transmitted to the HammerSound site as a self-extracting RAR compressed file. It may be stored on the HammerSound site as an ordinary ZIP file, but just in case you find that the unzipped file does not have the file extension ".SF2", but instead is an ".EXE" file, don't despair! After downloading the file to any convenient directory, simply double-click on the file and the decompressed file will appear automatically! It is also possible the file will be downloaded as a regular RAR compressed file. In this case you will need WinRAR to unwrap the file. The WinRAR utility,extremely useful for compressing soundfonts and WAV files, is available as shareware from www.rarsoft.com.
You can also download versions 1.4 (native .sf2 format, 3.59 MB) and 1.4rev (RAR format, 2.24 MB) directly from our realmac.info site.
After decompressing the file, use the soundcard control panel to load JEUX into an available user bank. If you load it in bank 42, you can download and play my MIDI files featuring French and other organ music. (The second bank of stops will then appear in the next available bank, number 43.) JEUX will need about 3.7 MB of your soundfont memory.
If you have a SoundBlaster Live! card, you will need to be sure that you have installed LiveWare version 2.0 or higher from Creative Labs. Earlier SoundBlaster Live! drivers produced distortion in some soundfonts, including some important stops in the JEUX soundfont. There is some information about this problem at the HammerSound site (see above).
For best effect, I set my AWE64 soundcard for "Hall 2" reverb and chorus level 3. Cavernous acoustics are generally desirable for realistic organ sound.
I replaced my Altec-Lansing speakers with Cambridge SoundWorks (3-piece set, includes sub-woofer), which proved to be vastly superior. You can order direct from Cambridge SoundWorkssite for a very reasonable price.
Use Vienna SoundFont Studio 2.3 to explore the inner workings of the JEUX soundfontor to build your own soundfont. Organ afficionados will want to see how the ripieni are constructed! In real organs, many ranks "break back" in order to keep from reaching excessively high pitches. These and other features of real organs have been incorporated into the design of the JEUX soundfont in order to make it as realistic as possible, while keeping the size of the file well below 4 MB.
A number of other vendors offer hardware or software that they claim supports the SoundFont format. In our experience, none of these correctly renders all of the parameters that are used in the Jeux SoundFont. The main culprits are the filters and the volume settings. It turns out that the published SoundFont standards were not followed in the SoundBlaster drivers. Among other issues, parameters that are nominally calibrated in decibels are actually calibrated in units of about 0.4 decibels. Consequently, although organ-like sounds will be produced by the hardware and software of other vendors, the balance between the stops, and among the virtual "ranks" within some individual stops, will be very bad. In effect, unless you happen to be using the same combination of hardware and software that I am using, I can't guarantee that you will hear the same sounds that I am hearing! However, if you are using the Jeux SoundFont to create your own music, you can use the stops in any way that sounds good to you. Jeux was designed with flexibility in mind.