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While looking for orchesrtral sounfont collections, googling “bellatrix squidfont sj”, I stumbled upon this forum on cockos (maker of the affordable and well received Reaper DAW):

http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=41266

It dates back to August 2009 and most of the links in the thread are now broken. It follows the experiment of user cerendir as he combines various free samples of solo instruments to build orchestral ensembles/sections. As I followed the thread and got to 2011 posts, I eventually landed on a familiar page:

https://www.box.com/shared/9og0bht86y

As it turns out, this is not another sad ending story of an amazing free download in the past that I’m too late to discover. cerendir, aka Mattias Westlund, happens to be the person who brought us the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra (SSO). I had been using it for a while now. It’s a great sounding free orchestral sample collection that could get you started before deciding which of the hundred dollar alternatives to buy. The clips below are examples of what can be achieved with SSO:

Mr Westlund’s official demo:

My own demo (discussed here):

And others…

and many more…

The samples are in sfz format instead of sf2, but that is not a problem with synthfont or any modern DAW today. There are also VSTs that load sfz files, such as Cakewalk’s free sfz player.

As for the other older orchestral collections that I’m googling, I managed to find them in a gaming forum of all places! The soundfonts are contained within bigger rar archives.

http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1200140

I think this user in deviant art is the same guy:

http://the-filmmusic-group.deviantart.com/journal/Free-HQ-Orchestra-Soundfonts-224143947

Download and use them to keep the links alive!