[LAU] Building gigasamples

[Mark Knecht]

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 7:39 AM, Julien Claassen <julien at c-lab.de> wrote:
> Hello everyone!
>  I was wondering, if it would be possible to create a stripped down
> commandline version of gigedit to bild a complete gigasample library of a
> preorganised .gig file and a directory of .wav-files. I've come across this
> sort of thing several times now. You get a sample library made up of a lot
> of .wav-files, a .nki file and an empty .gig-file shell. The only thing
> needing to be done is open the gig file, choose the right directory and
> click import, or however it is called.
>  Would it be possible, within reasonable amount of time and work, to
> implement such a mini special gig-builder for the CLI. I'm thinking of
> something like:
> gigbuild <file.gig> <wav-basedir>
>  Thanks a lot for reading.
>  Kindest regards
>           Julien

Love the idea. Thought about it often...

This makes the assumption (I think) that all all of the wave files are
properly trimmed with consistent (or no) quiet samples at the front
and hopefully very little at the end. It also assumes that all of the
samples have proper volumes WRT each other. In my experience with
large wave file distributions is this has never been the case.

Simplistically speaking it also assumes that you want to build a
single sample per note played which is fine for certain types of
sounds but not for the majority really. (But it does have value...)

One thing a properly designed gig file does is take _all_ of this into
account so that the samples start to approach being 'playable' as
opposed to just samples. Making that some sort of automated thing
would be quite a trick. Maybe you could script sox to determine where
the sound was and then auto-trim the wave files. Possibly you could
even recognize multiple files playing the same note. All that said
it's a lot of work and, in general, why these things are expensive
when done well.

Of course I think there's value even if your app only did part of
this. At least it's a start. I'd use it with GigaStudio here if it
worked.

- Mark