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