[linux-audio-user] Make a .GIG out of the MIS piano Was: Re: Copyrights on samples

Benno Senoner sbenno at gardena.net
Tue Oct 14 11:46:01 EDT 2003


The free sampled piano is here:
http://theremin.music.uiowa.edu/MIS.html  (click on the Piano link)

It is quite large, abot 1.5GB (each note sampled individually in 3 
velocities: pp, mf, ff).
I do not know how good the quality of this piano is, Steve Harris
hacked together a small player and posted some mp3s that were rendered 
from a MIDI file driving his application.
To me it does not sound that great, perhaps you need to tune
the velocity splits to make it sound well.

Anyway this sampleset is really large and can hardly fit into RAM.
SF2 was not created to be streamed from disk thus I suggest the following.

We of the linuxsampler team made significant progress in .GIG playback
thanks to the wonderful work done by Christian S.
He actually wrote libgig which is able to parse and load .GIG file
supporting all the articulation stuff (layering, key/velocity switching,
  dimensions etc).

see our new webpage (thanks Marek ;-) )
http://www.linuxsampler.org

(the new code is not online yet, because Christian and I are fixing bugs
and optimizing the streaming).

I cannot make forecasts when full GIG playback will be done, but shortly
  (1-2 weeks) we will release a version that can play back the samples
(without effects, and envelopes for now).

This means we will soon be able to play the MIS piano directly streamed 
from disk using LinuxSampler.

So the advice to Atti and others is:
One of you should use a Windows app which allows you to create .GIG 
files (with GigaStudio being the natural choice), download the MIS 
samples, tune volume, velocity-splits, trim samples (some samples have a 
bit of silence at the beginning etc) and make a .GIG file out of it.

After the piano sounds good in GigaStudio you should post it online.
That way as soon as LinuxSampler is ready (the piano sample does not 
require filters, envelopes etc) we can release a truly free
Grandpiano in software (samples + player).

To compare how well the MIS piano .GIG you will create ,sounds I suggest 
you to use this page:

http://www.af.lu.se/~fogwall/piano.html

On that page you find a classical music midi file
Fantaisie-Impromptu (Chopin)

and the corresponding audio clips rendered with various
digital pianos, hardware expanders and software samples
(including VST The Grand, various multi-Gigabyte piano samples for
Gigasampler etc).

Not sure about the quality we can achieve, for example the MIS piano
does not include pedal down samples.
IANAPP (I am not a piano player)  so I do not know if this is a big
disadvantage that makes it sound unprofessional.

Worth a try anyway.

What do you think ?

cheers,
Benno


 >> * sample the grandpiano of the latest Roland/Korg/Yamaha electric >piano
 >> * give the sample away
 >> * package it (sf2) and put it on my web site
 >>

 > if you are prepared to go through all the pain of trimming and looping
 > zillions of samples, why not do the real thing ?
 > there is a raw set of steinway grand samples floating around on the net
 > somewhere (was even announced to this list iirc), and i think it's even
 > an anechoic recording.
 > the license was something along the lines of "free for the taking".






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