[bonestormii_]

Yeah, articulation should be standardized in the midi specification. It's always a custom mapping to control it even when proper articulations are available. "Oh cool, custom mapping?!", you might say. Wrong. It sucks, because it tends to make old old scores utilizing articulation unusable because the mapping was stored in some obscure plugin configurations divided amongst many plugins.

It would be great if articulation messages were standardized, and then you could just expect them to be there, and if they are absent, the soundfont can simply fall back to the closest thing available. That kind of helpful logic is not possible with custom mappings.

[tgv]

Has been tried. Check Spitfire's UACC attempt. There are way too many articulations and ways of naming them to get a complete list, and even when there would be such a list, you'll be asking yourself "hmm, this says Long Con Sordino Sul Pont", but this 'soundfont' doesn't have that. What to replace it with?".

Bear in mind that not all sample libraries have articulations. Some of the more modern libraries and plugins include a modelling component, or are pure modelling, which allows you to use controllers to get those articulations in a much more flexible way.

[nyanpasu64]

Off-the-shelf .sf2 files containing full-GM instrument banks simply don't have sharp attack samples. I hope they will start having them, but I don't know what it takes. Are single-instruments (or .sfz files) more likely to have them? Adding support in soundfont players for selectable articulation? MIDI 2? "Just buy a commercial plugin?"

[PaulDavisThe1st]

SF2 ... forget it. SFZ can do this sort of thing already, as can Kontakt format and also Decent Sampler.

SF2 is dead. It was never capable enough as a format to deal with what really needed to be dealt with. It is a quintessentially dated technology, and unless your requirements for sample libraries are very limited ("make a gong-type sound when I hit middle C"), SF2 is not for you.