On Mon, 13 Aug 2012 20:17:47 +1200 Robin Paulson <robin.paulson(a)gmail.com> wrote: There are two different things: The meta file, sfz in this case, and the audio recordings aka. samples. I think it is not a good idea to use a git repository for binary recordings (wave or flac), but an rsync directory without any history and diff information could be enough. But more important: Creating samples in a remote and distributed way does not work. It needs to be all from one hand or else the sound will not match. This is one reason why Sonatina is so mediocre. But what can and and should be improved is the sfz file, which of course can be edited through git. What can be done with the sfz: Loop points (hard) Extended range (very easy) Remove the transposition from some instruments (medium) Probably tweaking release times (technically easy, a lot of trial and error) Make paths linux compatible (already done by someone I can't remember but probably reads this list as well) Improving the actual sounds may be possible as well by mixing and layering the samples itself with other instruments. But this is very frustrating! I search the web in regular intervals for hours but finding properly licensed instrument recordings (meant for samples) is not an easy task. Probably the Sonatina author did his best by gathering all the sf2 in existence. There are few recordings which are in pure wave format and not connected through an .sfz or similar. For example I found this one here recently: http://theremin.music.uiowa.edu/MIS.html It looked very promising. Proper recordings, 4 audio technicans, proper license, well sorted. I only downloaded the Violin so far. Oh boy!! What a shitload of fuck. What were they thinking? They recorded this with a 10 year old violing beginner or something like this. Unstable, scratchy, shaky playing. I really hope the other instruments are better. But the violin is already unusable. Creation of new instrument is a huge effort and even then it has been all done already. Until you are a really good recording enginner, specialized in sample recording, and have pro level musicians, and most important: a vision how you want to create this virtual instrument the project is already doomed to the lower level of quality, only sticking out because it has an open source lisence. This is not so true for percussive instruments (percussion itself, piano, everything with "hit and forget") but for strings it is. I see the future of instrument technology in Phyiscal Modelling anyway. But currently there are even less people interested in developing these than recording and creating sampled instruments. At least you don't need fancy recording hardware and rent stages and a whole orchestras for months. Closed source, not even a real software yet, but very impressive: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOBnDsz6ZmQ (and the other 2 videos in the channel) There are one or two Linux softwares for creating phyiscal audio modelling but afaik they were abandoned years ago at a level far away from "realisic" instruments. Nils

On 14 August 2012 04:05, Nils <list(a)nilsgey.de> wrote: yep, i'd agree fine, technical details can be worked out later. git/rsync/ftp/svn: whatever suits there are so many examples from history of people being told "that won't work, don't do it", that i'm amazed people still say this any more. in other news, apparently people can't create decent software/encyclopedias/maps/music unless they are professional, work in close knit teams overseen by professional managers who give out work to them as they see fit great, useful suggestions see above regarding "professionals", and remember that the original meaning of the word amateur was "one who loves what they do", from the french word for love, amour [1]. money is not the only motivator/measure of quality, and suggesting it is propagates an ideology. centralised planning, or a "vision" is not the only way to organise i find this useful for getting samples: http://www.freesound.org/ [1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/en/wiki/amateur#Noun -- robin http://fu.ac.nz - Auckland's Free University

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 7:45 AM, Paul Davis <paul(a)linuxaudiosystems.com> wrote: Especially when you are talking about orchestral instruments, finding the players who can perform all of the notes, articulations, different levels for velocity layers, etc etc etc, is a daunting task. Commercial sample library producers hire full orchestras and the production is as elaborate and expensive as recording a film score live. Musicians who are skilled enough to record samples cleanly and accurately don't like working for free, either. You might find a small community orchestra, but the playing skill levels vary with those, and those orchestras typically will not perform for free either, especially for the long hours it requires to record a sample library. -- Brett W. McCoy -- http://www.brettwmccoy.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "In the rhythm of music a secret is hidden; If I were to divulge it, it would overturn the world." -- Jelaleddin Rumi

On 14 August 2012 09:31, Fons Adriaensen <fons(a)linuxaudio.org> wrote: Hi, there. What about these samples http://www.philharmonia.co.uk/thesoundexchange/make_music/samples/library/ ? "License: You are free to use these samples as you wish, including releasing them as part of a commercial work. The only restriction is they must not be sold or made available 'as is' (i.e. as sampler or as a sampler instrument)." I'm just starting with them. I think any linuxsampler user probably knows, but what do you guys think of these samples? Does it meet the tech and license requirements? My first bad impression is about the sample format, they are all distributed as MP3 - I would consider a non compressed format instead. -- Marcel Bonnet

On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 4:49 AM, Nils <list(a)nilsgey.de> wrote: if you really wanted to set things up so that many people could use them, you could distribute them as-is with a script that generated an sfz, or as a script that fetched them from the original site, and then generated an sfz. the license wording though is really non-sensical, and in fact as it is written, my interpretation would be "you cannot give these to anyone else in the form in which you have received them ("as-is") - if you distribute them it must be free of charge and in some OTHER format".

On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 8:07 AM, Simon Wise <simonzwise(a)gmail.com> wrote: It's a pretty standard license for most sample libraries, even commercial ones distributed as WAV files rather than in a specific sampler file format -- you can use them for any commercial use as long as you don't re-distribute as another sample library or bundled with a sampler product (like bundling with Kontakt player). I don't think there is any issue with importing into a sampler like Kontakt or LinuxSampler and using them directly to produce music. In fact, it looks like there is a screenshot of Kontakt right on the same page. -- Brett W. McCoy -- http://www.brettwmccoy.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "In the rhythm of music a secret is hidden; If I were to divulge it, it would overturn the world." -- Jelaleddin Rumi

On 16 August 2012 10:11, Marcel Bonnet <marcelbonnet(a)gmail.com> wrote: FYI: back to the philharmonia site, I decided to take a loot at http://www.philharmonia.co.uk/thesoundexchange/terms_and_conditions/ , see this item: 4. In accessing the Philharmonia website you agree to access the contents solely for your own personal, non-commercial use. You are not permitted to copy, download, store in any medium (including any other website), distribute, transmit, broadcast, show in public, adapt or change in any way any part of the Philharmonia website for any other purpose without the prior written permission of Philharmonia or in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or other applicable law. So it seems illegal to make a script to download the samples, as suggested by Paul :( So they give us samples, they all know their samples are going to be used in recordings, but every user must repeat the same damn job to package the samples into a sampler. It's not reasonable to me. -- Marcel Bonnet

On Thu, 16 Aug 2012 15:44:58 +0200 "rosea.grammostola" <rosea.grammostola(a)gmail.com> wrote: The license may be unclear and may contradict the general website terms but the only question that matters would be to release the actual source samples, the uncompressed recordings. Nils

On 14/08/12 2:05 AM, Nils wrote: Possibly me :) My copy of the SFZ files with corrected paths is here: http://wootangent.net/~lsd/music/sonatina-fixed-sfz.zip I contributed these back to the original author, but I don't think he's released any updates since the initial release. Thanks Leigh