[LAU] Fwd: Free Yamaha grand piano soundfont

[Roberto Gordo Saez]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Roberto Gordo Saez <roberto.gordo at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 7:50 PM
Subject: Free Yamaha grand piano soundfont
To: freepats at opensrc.org


Another free soundfont for the free sotfware community, this time
resembling a Yamaha Disklavier Pro piano. Creative Commons
Attribution 3.0 license. Enjoy!

52 samples at 44100Hz, 16bit. Size 45.5MiB.

Example music rendered through the soundfont:

 - Piano Sonata No. 8, Op. 13, "Pathétique", 1st movement
  (Ludwig van Beethoven)
  http://zenvoid.org/audio/beethoven_sonata_op13_pathetique_m1_20080808.ogg

 - Für Elise (Ludwig van Beethoven):
  http://zenvoid.org/audio/beethoven_fur_elise_20080808.ogg

I've added a reverb to those music files in order to please to
my friend Aaron ;-)

The soundfont is here:
http://zenvoid.org/i/audio.html

There will be more releases, I will try to improve quality. I'm
working in loops (currently there are no loops) and more layers.

It is built from the Zenph Studios Yamaha Disklavier Pro Piano
Multisamples for OLPC. The OLPC project recently released a
collection of samples under CC-BY license; in particular, this
multisampled piano is very good.

According to Dr. Richard Boulanger, there will be a complete
General MIDI soundfont released soon under CC-BY license! It
will be probably a small soundfont, optimized for the OLPC
project, and good for embeded or normal desktop usage (I think).
I hope it could be used as the default General MIDI soundfont in
most GNU/Linux distributions. Very good news. Of course, high
quality samples will still be wanted for specialized
distributions and professional audio composition.

A few notes about the reverb:

I've added a very nice convolution reverb to the example music
with Jconv, using impulse responses from the Promenadikeskus
concert hall in Pori, Finland. While doing it, I've noticed the
lack of free impulse responses :-(  It has been discussed
before in the LAU list; some publicly available IR files are
restricted to non-commercial usage or come with very weird
conditions. I couldn't found unrestricted, free IR files. AFAIK
some of them (either made by individuals or organizations) are
not being commercially exploited in any way, so maybe some
authors will be willing to relicense under free licenses when
contacted... sadly, it seems a common fact of our modern culture
to forbid everything by default, without a good reason.

If anyone knows about original and free impulse responses
(really free, as freedom, and with a known free license or clear
license terms attached) please let me know.