LOL got into creating VST2 instruments again with Synthedit. It’s because I have this idea for a largely-useless wavetable oscillator that could play rhythms if the keys played were low enough. Before this program, the only good alternative with the user’s own samples was Viena but it was buggy and difficult to get into. Note that was “Viena” with one “n” and not the E-MU program that required their hardware IINM.
SoundFont creation could be tedious but this Polyphone makes it ridiculously easy. If I moved up to the later releases of Synthedit (for 64-bit VST3 but buggier and more resource-hungry) I could have opted for SFZ playback which is better, only samples joined by a text-file description instead of a monolithic soundware format.
I created a 32-bit installation only to run my registered copy of Synthedit from over 12 years back. Not this distribution LOL.
EDIT: despite the somewhat misleading description in the box just above, an SFZ file is only a text file which has to be a specific format, it does not have “binary blobs” or anything like that. The description always references usually WAV samples on disk which are kept separate. This format was “founded” by a plug-in called SFZ created by RGC Audio. That was the freeware version, and another called SFZ+ used to be sold by Cakewalk company from New England (before it was taken over).