[linux-audio-user] writing gig files (was: giga files and large soundfonts)

[Christian Schoenebeck]

Es geschah am Mittwoch, 30. Juni 2004 15:59 als James Stone schrieb:
> I was wondering if anyone has any knowledge about generating giga or akai
> compatible files?

You know we discussed that several times on the LinuxSampler list. At the 
moment libgig is only capable to read, not to write gigs. Extending libgig 
with write support would probably take me a week, so it's not that much. But 
I would only do so if there are people who are definitely willing to develop 
an instrument editor for the Giga format or extend an existing one.

The Giga format is more powerful than the Akai format, so I would definitely 
prefer that instead of Akai, but the Giga format has some drawbacks:

	* most important it's based on RIFF, thus it has (officially) a file size 
	  limit of 4GB

	* it's proprietary

	* it has many relicts in the format which are simply unused nowadays, means 
	  there are dirty redundancies

	* it's binary only, so you can't easily adjust articulation informations with 
	  a simple ASCII editor

	* the unknown fields in the format = relicts (which aren't necessary to know
	  about when you just read the gig) might cause that the original Gigasampler 
	  to not accept the patch file anymore after editing / creating it or at 
	  least could cost us some time til it actually accepts it. So like with any 
	  proprietary format, at the moment I simply can't guarantee that it will 
	  also work right away with the original Gigasampler (I'm quite optimistic 
	  though)

That's why we came to the decision that it might be better to define our own 
sampler patch file format (maybe XML based) before we implement write support 
e.g. for the Giga format.

What are your opinions?

CU
Christian