[LAU] What kind of sample(er)s etc for classical music

[Lorenzo]

I'de like to have some info/pointers on samples for classical music 
(especially orchestra) in the situations when one has to provide a 
'virtual' performance.

There are plenty of synths and stuff done with linux for linux, I myself 
use puredata extensively for electionic music, but this is a different 
dcenario.

I've lately tried the linuxsampler stuff (qsanpler etc.), and was 
impressed by the freebie gig piano on the website, but it looks the gig 
format is quite dead at the moment, I wonder if there is a second hand 
market for those, as it looks they were very popular before tascam 
closed down the gigasampler thing.
For classical music, searching around it seems that currently SoundFonts 
are the best supported form of samples on Linux.
I'm not necessarily talking of free stuff: quality sampling is a 
laborious and skilful process and paying for good samples is fair enough 
for a (digital) musician, so I'm talking about support: in fact it seems 
that most packages are stand-alones for windows or mac.


Best regards,
Lorenzo.