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

[Christian Schoenebeck]

Es geschah am Freitag 18 März 2005 21:59 als Bluefuture schrieb:
> Il giorno ven, 18-03-2005 alle 19:40 +0000, Daniel James ha scritto:
> > Hi Stefano,
> >
> > > I think that swami already support editing of gig file.
> >
> > According to the website, that feature is in the development version.
> >
> >From a mail of Josh Green 2005-01-03 in swami-devel mailiglist:
>
>  Nice to hear that linuxsampler is improving, I hope they provide an API
>  for it to be used generically for other than GigaSampler files (I must
>  admit I"m biased towards that proprietary format).

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).

>  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?

> > > It could be posted a tutorial on oneshotsampler about creating good
> > > Gigafile instead of simple wave file.
> >
> > If someone from the linuxsampler project has that information then it
> > would good to disseminate it - maybe as a 'quicktoot'. I personally
> > have some good microphones, and record plenty of real instruments
> > that could provide samples.

Well, do you have GSt editor? We could provide some documentation about the 
Gigasampler format if somebody's really interested. Once you know the 
possiblities of the format, I guess you won't have much problems to get into 
any instrument editor that supports the Gig format. But learning to produce 
*good* patches might still take you some time.

As libgig already supports (reading) the Gigasampler format up to GSt 3.0 
quite well and libgig is not too big, we could also add write support to 
libgig without too much work. But then still somebody would have to write an 
instrument editor on top of libgig.
And at the end I still doubt if it's worth the effort and if it wouldn't be 
better to build on a free, well designed sampler format.

>
> Good idea.
>
> > > If linuxaudio consortuim could give the hardware infrastructure for
> > > hosting Gigafiles in oneshotsampler we could have an usable
> > > sampling free software/free sampler banks infrastructure
> >
> > I'm afraid linuxaudio.org does not currently own any hardware which it
> > could donate, but you could try asking member projects. AGNULA Libre
> > Music hosts complete works, but I don't think they are doing samples
> > as yet.
> > If you're talking about the really large samples, I think they might
> > exceed disc space and bandwidth limitations quite quickly on any
> > hosted machine. Perhaps a peer-to-peer infrastructure based around
> > BitTorrent would work.

We could offer quite some GB for patches and we have a large bandwith. But on 
the long term I agree we might have to use a distributed solution like 
bittorent.

CU
Christian

[http://www.linuxsampler.org]