So, what's NitroFont Mini, you might ask? Well, the answer is pretty much obvious.
NitroFont is naturally a lightweight version of NitroFont which is more than 10 times smaller than its larger counterpart--at around 5.5 MB. It was released on September 7, 2025.
Version 1.0 was released on September 7, 2025, and was based on NitroFont 1.1 and 1.1_1.
Version 1.1 was released on October 24, 2025, when I actually bothered to finally update the soundfont to match NitroFont 1.52 (which, by the way, was released the same day!).
Version 1.11 was released on October 30, 2025, and brought some changes for the sake of consistency with NitroFont.
Version 1.11_1 came out on October 31, 2025, and it only fixed a minor oversight affecting the metadata--or the description in particular, which said that 1.11 was based on NitroFont 1.52, while, in fact, it was based on 1.53.
Version 1.12 was released the same day, shortly after 1.11_1, and brought some quality-of-life changes for consistency with NitroFont.
Version 2.0 was released on December 16, 2025, bringing some changes to make NitroFont Mini a bit more in line with its higher-quality sibling. Samples from the Sonivox EAS were replaced by their faithful equivalents from the RIM 8100, just in case.
There are two factors that make NitroFont Mini so small compared to the regular NitroFont:
Use of lower-quality samples (some instruments use shortened and/or lower-frequency versions of the samples they use in NitroFont, or at least similar, though still lower-quality samples).
Use of fewer samples overall (NitroFont Mini 2.0 has only 310 samples, which is less than half the number of sample in NitroFont).
It's actually hard to think of reasons to use a lower-quality, more compact version of NitroFont, because old computers are rare nowadays. But still, if you have limited disk space or sluggish download speeds, NitroFont Mini can be a good alternative for you. NitroFont isn't completely faithful to NitroFont, but still does sound similar to the latter.
As of April 13, 2026, NitroFont Mini has officially been discontinued, and has been replaced by NitroFont Lite. This version of NitroFont is ~44 MB rather than NitroFont Mini's 5 MB, but it's still a viable difference compared to the full, standard version of NitroFont.