[Consortium] Re: [Swami-devel] Re: [Linuxsampler-devel] Re: linuxsampler and oneshotsampler

[Josh Green]

On Fri, 2005-03-18 at 23:17 +0100, Christian Schoenebeck wrote:
> Yes, LS is designed to support different kinds of sampler engines. We just 
> concentrated on the Gig format, as we thought it to offer the most promising 
> instrument libraries. As we meanwhile support this format quite well, we hope 
> to start implementing other sampler engines (that is other formats) very 
> soon. Personally I'm especially keen to add support for Akai and a complete 
> new and free sampler format. Which brings me to another point:
> 
> Shouldn't we better design a new, free sampler format instead of using 
> proprietary formats for free instruments? Because it will take much longer to 
> develop (or adjust existing) instrument loaders & editors to be fully 
> compliant with proprietary formats (due to missing specs) than developing 
> editors for a free, well defined new format. And think about all the 
> drawbacks of exiting, proprietary formats. E.g. I would appreciate also to be 
> able to edit an instrument on the console in case (tar - XML).
> 

Yes, I agree it would be good to design an open standard.  SF2 is a
rather open standard, but rather limited.  DLS is pretty open standard
and much more flexible, but it is hard to get free documentation on the
DLS2 format (they want you to buy it).  XML and FLAC/WAV sounds good to
me.  I've been thinking, that with the current OO nature of libInstPatch
it would be pretty easy just to export the object properties to XML
which would lead to a "standard" for storing any formats that
libInstPatch supports.

My particular interest in linuxsampler is in writing a linuxsampler
plugin to Swami for supporting multiple instrument formats (like what is
currently possible with FluidSynth, albeit in a SoundFont oriented way).

> >  There is still a bit 
> >  of work to do to add GigaSampler support to libInstPatch/Swami.  I"m
> 
> I wonder if the Gigasampler format fully fits into the Swami environment. 
> Wouldn't it mean quite a (design) change in libinstpatch & Swami to be able 
> to cover the whole Gigasampler format (up to GSt 3.0) with write support?
> 

Not really, libInstPatch was designed to handle multiple instrument
formats (it already supports DLS which as you know GIG is an extension
of).  You may be thinking of older Swami 0.9.x and libInstPatch which
were very SF2 oriented.  Granted, native GigaSampler write support isn't
a priority for me, since I consider it one of the more proprietary of
the currently supported formats.  I'd much rather someone store to a
more open format but still be able to leverage off of gig files,
although I would love to see good native support in Swami for gig.

> CU
> Christian
> 
> [http://www.linuxsampler.org]


Cheers.
	Josh Green