Sforzando

[Veerstryngh Thynner]

Hello all,

Just came across Sforzando, a new (for me at least) sfz sample player (by Plogue) based on Aria:

Plogue website: http://www.plogue.com/products/sforzando/
Plogue Sforzando forums: http://www.plogue.com/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=22
YouTube tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O62kISpCN9Y
Sforzando PDF manual: http://s3.amazonaws.com/sforzando/sforz ... _1.621.pdf

Plogue advertises Sforzando as 'cross-platform'. However, only specs for Windows and Mac OS are provided. Which seems a bit confusing, since cross-platform also used to include Linux, to my mind.

Sforzando would be ideal for my requirements - if indeed Linux-compatible, of course. Which brings me to my actual question: I'd really like to hear from other Linux musicians what their practical experience with Sforzando is (if applicable) as to compatibility and general usage. I'm on KDE Mint myself, by the way.

Thanks very much for your help.

tnob

[tatch]

i used sforzando when I was on OS X, it's no different from using carla's built-in linuxsampler.

[ssj71]

I used some of their free demo sfz files. They had all the slashes in the paths wrong so it took quite some modifying before it actually worked (in LS). I don't think they are considering linux in their work. Technically OSX and windows support still means cross platform, just not platforms that I care about.

[varpa]

Sforzando runs well with wine in my experience and I've also used it hosted by carla.lv2 as a plugin in Ardour. The advantage over linuxsampler as an SFZ host is that it supports more of the SFZ2 spec (such as it is) which really means it support the SFZ keywords introduced by Sforzando. To some extent the Sforzando version of SFZ is the "industry" standard some it is useful to have it available to take advantage of the features of some SFZs which linuxsampler does not currently support.

[Veerstryngh Thynner]

If Sforzando functions as 'standalone' in KDE Mint, the general idea is to transfer my whole collection of symphonic and jazz musical instrument sfz, currently on a separate Windows 7 laptop, to KDE.

Sforzando runs well with wine in my experience and I've also used it hosted by carla.lv2 as a plugin in Ardour.

I had Ardour on my system, for a while, but it never really worked for me. I feel much more at ease with Audacity. KXStudio has been on my mind, though. So in association with that carla.lv2 Ardour plugin just mentioned: might integrating Sforzando with KXStudio be feasible, I wonder, in some way or other?

tnob

[varpa]

As it happens just yesterday I found out about a new piano sample that works with sforzando, the Estate Grand from http://productionvoices.com/. This is a commercial product, but since the introductory price was fairly low and I like pianos I got it. Works perfectly in kxstudio. I find it convenient to host it in standalone Carla rather than by running sforzando standalone because then you can easily add effects like reverb and save the whole setup as a Carla preset. But I also may run in in Ardour with carla.lv2. To install sforazando you must download the .exe windows installer from sforzando website and run install it with wine, basically run the command "wine WIN_sforzando_v1.822.exe" (this is the standard way to run a Windows executable with wine. Then you'll need to pick where to install it. By default wine will create a psuedo-windows directory tree under ~/.wine and install it somewhere there.
On the downside the SFZs that come with Estate Grand won't even load in linuxsampler.

[stanlea]

My experience with sforzando trough wine is not so good : a lot of xruns. But I suppose it's up to your configuration.

More interesting, I found like everybody that the sfz files provided with sforzando (the free sample pack) were not working in Linux Sampler : there is a way to edit the sfz in order to load in Linux.
Three steps :
1 with a batch editor convert all flac files to wav files
2 in the sfz file, find the line where the sample directory is written, and change it with the absolute path (ex /home/myself/samples/freesounds/.........)
3 still in the sfz files, replace the chain "$GEXT1" with ";wav"

and you're done, of course the sforzando opcodes are not recognized by the linuxsampler engine, but sometimes it's not a problem.

[varpa]

Just so you know linuxsampler supports flac since 2 1/2 year ago.

[stanlea]

Just so you know linuxsampler supports flac since 2 1/2 year ago.

So just do steps 2 and 3 with .flac instead of .wav

[Veerstryngh Thynner]

I don't have any experience with running Windows programs in Wine. But on trying to find out more on this, I read somewhere that Wine sometimes also "imports" Windows viruses and other stuff you don't want in your system.

Is that true?

tnob

[varpa]

I'm not an expert on this, but I suspect that if you are careful about which programs you run with wine and download stuff from respectable sources I really doubt this would be a problem. I only run a few things with wine since I'd rather run native stuff and also because not everything runs properly in wine. Also concerning the problems stanlea had with xruns might be also related to running older versions of carla. I'm using kxstudio + carla-git so this is absolutely the latest version.

[stanlea]

Then I'm going to reinstall sforzando.

[ssj71]

I read somewhere that Wine sometimes also "imports" Windows viruses and other stuff you don't want in your system.

Is that true?

This sounds like fear mongering to me. I typically try to use native software, but I have used wine a couple times. Its nice to have available and there's no need to fear it, but I wouldn't like to rely on it because it just seems like a delicate system. And I always prefer OSS.

[stanlea]

So I gave another try to sforzando with kxstudio apps up to date : still xruns, even with low CPU.