With this update, the internal Soundfont playback engine has been deprecated in favor of being able to output MIDI to external devices. This enables Angel Beats to connect to standalone instruments, VST hosts, Soundfont players, hardware synths, other DAWs, and anything else that can receive MIDI input.

There were a few reasons for this decision: 

1. Soundfont playback wasn't working. The timing was inaccurate and got increasingly worse with more tracks. The technical reason was that input handling, screen rendering, and audio rendering were all happening on the same system process, so they were competing for CPU time and the playback timing suffered for it. The long term solution for this is to move all audio rendering to a separate system process. I'm building an audio engine named ensemble to achieve this, but it isn't ready yet. So for the short term, MIDI output seems like the best solution.
2. Existing Soundfont players already have more features. Between Qsynth, VirtualMIDISynth, and sforzando, there are already plenty of better options than the minimal feature set that Angel Beats provided.
3. Soundfonts just aren't worth it. Having Soundfonts as the primary playback mechanism contradicts Angel Beats' goal of being future oriented and more than just a prototyping tool, so investing any more time in Soundfont support would be a waste. I'd much rather invest that time into integrating more advanced music technology like VST and CLAP plugins.

The downside to this change is that there is now some setup required to hear playback. In short, you need to create a virtual MIDI port using loopMIDI, which you can then use to send MIDI from Angel Beats to other software or hardware that can generate audio. For more detailed instructions, check out the tutorials How to Create a Virtual MIDI Device and How to Use Soundfonts for Playback.

CHANGELOG

Features:

• tracks can be connected to external MIDI devices
• edit actions for track name and channel number

Bugfixes:

• mute doesn't apply immediately, only after playback restarts
• horizontally scrolling in step sequencer only applies to single row
• negative scroll offset in piano roll on larger screens
• misformatted tempo text

Changes:

• remove Soundfont engine and associated DLLs
• remove SGM-v2 Soundfont from download directory