On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 09:38:34AM +0200, Dan Muresan wrote:
Despite these shortcomings, I found sf2 and qsynth the
only decent
alternative. Timidity worked very poorly for me. Fluidsynth doesn't
support GUS .pat files, so I couldn't use the freepat project.
Freepats project is currently trying to build soundfonts in sf2 format
and better quality samples. It is a harder task than expected, as most
free sf2 files are build from samples extracted from commercial synths
(korg, yamaha, roland...). For copyright reasons those samples can't be
bundled on a free (GPL or CC-BY licensed) soundfont, there were legal
problems in the past, see this article by Walt Gregg:
http://freepats.zenvoid.org/walt/README.htm
I contacted several sf2 authors (from hammersound and other sites),
and *nobody* confirmed clearly that their samples were original and
could be relicensed. So all must to be recorded from scratch to be
sure.
So far there are some pianos,
http://freepats.zenvoid.org/sf2/acoustic_grand_piano_ydp_20080910.sf2
http://freepats.zenvoid.org/sf2/acoustic_grand_piano_ydp_20080910.txt
http://freepats.zenvoid.org/sf2/acoustic_piano_imis_1.sf2
http://freepats.zenvoid.org/sf2/acoustic_grand_piano_ydp_20080910.txt
some drums by Marcos Guglielmetti,
http://freepats.zenvoid.org/musix/samples/drums/
and other random samples pending to be converted into soundfonts. I am
currently working to process some more drums kindly provided by
Hartmut Noack, some synthesized sounds and an acoustic classical guitar
recorded by myself. The acoustic guitar sf2 is in good progress, it
will be released soon, this is a demo:
http://zenvoid.org/tmp/classical-guitar-sf2-demo.ogg
Note that the freepats web is outdated, most announcements are made in
the mailing list.