I think the old Emu Emulator III sample bank CDROMs are excellent. A lot of
work went into those sample-banks. Until I recently re-fired up my EIIIxp, I
forgot just how nice they were (and how nice real hardware sounds and
plays). The 2Mb samples of strings, pianos, instruments, percussion are very
musical, responsive, w/ a lot of thought to modulation control for
expressiveness. Ones I have:
#10. Elements of Sound 1mb collection
#11. Elements of Sound 2mb collection
#12. ESI-32 150MB Production Soundset
#13. Dance 2000
#16. Twenty Six Studio Drum Kits and Percussion ESI-32
Many of these are now available for cheap:
http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=+EIII+cdrom
The "NorthStar" collection
http://www.northstarsamples.com/ProductIndex.html is
awesome if you can afford it....
I wish there was a way of loading these pre-existing sample banks into a
linux softsampler or translating into soundfonts. Of course, you'd
invariably lose a lot of the useful programming (filters, envelopes,
multisamples) that went into engineering these "pro" samples, in conversion.
Are there any linux softsamplers that can access the massive library of
pre-existing samples. Or Linux sample translators equivalent to "Translator
Emulator X Convertor, by Chicken Systems" which will convert "Akai
S-1000/3000, Akai MPC, Emu EIII/ESi/Emax, Tascam GigaStudio 1 +
2, SoundFont, Native Instruments Kontakt 1 + 2, Steinberg HALion I and I".
Or best of all, an open-source version of the "Emulator X3"
http://www.emu.com/products/product.asp?category=501&subcategory=168&am…
:-)
Niels
http://nielsmayer.com
PS: or you can just sample frozen lakebeds, solar winds, and spaceweather:
http://silentlistening.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/dispersion-of-sound-waves-i…
http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu/stereo_solarwind/sounds_examples.html , and
http://spaceweatherradio.com/