LMS Suite 12.07. Euphoria, the new king of Linux samplers?

[jeffh]

I'm excited to announce the immediate availability of LMS Suite 12.07. This is by far the biggest and most exciting release since the project was founded about 6 months ago. The first set of plugins were all simple proof(s)-of-concept, intended to establish a basic framework for future plugins. The project is now maturing to the point of making serious tools for serious musicians.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/libmods ... s/plugins/

New for 12.07:

* LMS Filter, LMS Comb, LMS Distortion are now gone.
* New Plugin: LMS Modulex (concatenation of Modular Effects). Replaces the now obsolete plugin with a single modular plugin, with up to 4 effects per instance.
* All plugins: new 'black-n-sexy' theme
* Euphoria: Completely revamped polyphonic effects, now fully modular, with a modulation matrix for routing any envelope/LFO to any effect parameter
* Euphoria: Numerous fixes and improvements
* Ray-V : Tighter timing, now semi-sample-accurate
* Several potential crashes in LMS Filter, LMS Comb and LMS Distortion are now fixed in LMS Modulex.
* All plugins: Numerous smaller fixes and improvements
* Euphoria supports full saving of instruments to a file (the file can be distributed to others with the samples, as long as the samples are all in chid directories of the directory the .u4ia file is in. Euphoria has a menu option for copying all files to a single directory automagically)

Known issues:

* The effects plugins can't be used in Muse2. It requires a LADSPA flag that breaks the plugins in most other hosts. I'm going to eventually start including separate plugins with a -muse prefix just for Muse2, but I haven't done so yet.
* For reasons unknown, the QFileDialog used to load samples doesn't recognize certain .wav files. The workaround is to change the dropdown from "Audio Files (*.wav *.aiff *.ogg)" to "All (*.*)".


Euphoria is definitely the star of the show. IMHO, it's within striking distance of being serious competition to Windows/Mac samplers such as Kontakt and Halion.

However, I'm currently only recommending using Euphoria as a standalone instrument, due to the following:

* Muse2 DSSI plugin: Crash upon opening a 2nd instance, and then inputting MIDI notes. (Since the plugin has no awareness whatsoever of how many other instances are running or what host it is running it, I'm going to write it off as a Muse2 bug, which I don't believe they have any inclination to fix). However, if you're content to only use 1 instance, then it seems to work perfectly fine in Muse2, which is an otherwise stellar DAW, BTW.
* Qtractor: Fails to open the GUI. The GUI is quite huge now, but obviously this would be a Qtractor problem, because every other host can at least load the GUI.
*Rosegarden: Loads Euphoria, opens the GUI, dies a slow, painful death upon attempting to play a MIDI note.

However, any host that can send ALSA MIDI to external plugins can be used with Euphoria standalone (muse2 must be launched with the -A switch to do this). I've tested this arrangement in:

*Muse2: works perfectly this way, and is an enjoyable experience, highly recommended.
*Seq24: works great, highly recommended.
*Qtractor: Works, but I gave up because it's too wonky and apparently can only have 1 MIDI out. LMS Suite doesn't yet support any MIDI channel other than 0, so this probably isn't a good way to use it.
*Rosegarden: I couldn't figure out how to make Rosegarden send MIDI from a track to an external instrument(although I was able to create a device from Euphoria, so it probably is possible).

Once you've got this setup, you can go to Euphoria>Menu>SaveInstrumentToFile and save the entire sampler state to a .u4ia file. I will eventually add session manager support to do all of this automatically for all instances.

<rant>
In jack-dssi-host (which Euphoria uses for standalone mode), Euphoria works 100% perfectly, and stable. Since jack-dssi-host is the reference implementation of a DSSI host written by the DSSI folks themselves, I think it's fair to say that if something works there, it should work anywhere. Having said that, I spent endless amounts of time petitioning various DAW developers to take a closer look at their DSSI implementations, and even making multi-hundred-dollar donations to their projects. My efforts have consistently been meet with "well, [insert name of overly-simple existing DSSI plugin] works, so it must be your code". Unfortunately, things don't really work that way in the real world, especially when Euphoria is literally 1000x more complex than the oft cited CALF Monosynth that DAW developer claim makes their DSSI implementation 100% sound just because it works. CALF Monosynth is a synth in the same vein as Ray-V: functional enough to be useful, but just barely, if it were any simpler it would be useless. The fact of the matter is that anything that works in jack-dssi-host should work in their hosts, not the other way around, that 1 plugin working in their hosts mean that all plugins should work, or else it's the plugin's fault.

Why am I telling you this? I want to make it abundantly clear why using LMS Suite in a DSSI host is completely unsupported. I fully support using them standalone, where I'm confident you won't have any problems, but I can't fix them in any of the Linux DAWs unless the developers are actually interested in acknowledging their DSSI implementations suck, and want to fix them. If you want to use Euphoria or Ray-V with your DAW of choice, I'd recommend just using Seq24 or Muse2 for MIDI, as described above(Ray-V must save to preset instead of a file). Don't come to me with reports of "crashes in DAW xyz", because there's nothing I can do about it, sorry.
</rant>

[nils]

And who is going to create the sample libraries?

[jeffh]

This isn't a soundfont player or similar, it can load any .wav file (or any other format supported by libsndfile), so the 'libraries' don't have to be specific to Euphoria. The .u4ia files are just plain text that points to sample files (either relative or absolute path), and that store the effects parameters of a Euphoria instrument.

You can freely use .wav format samples avaiable all over the internet for free, or from commercial sample CDs like Vengeance, whatever else the kids are using these days, etc...

I'm interested in providing a small 'factory' sound library with Euphoria to show what it can do, but I haven't created any yet. If you or anybody else would like to contribute to the sound library, I am completely cool with outside contributions.

[nils]

You wrote it rivals, or will rival in the future, "Kontakt and Halion".

But "the kids" use these and other modern sampler engines because it can do more than the old ways of just mapping waves on midi keys with a few extension. This development had its height with the Gigastudio and the latest addition to these formats is sfz which can do everything what simple waves, over sf2 over gigastudio and more can do.
But basically it is still playing waves.

What the modern engines do is more. They are a basis for advanced work that makes them more instrument than just advanced media players. Some libs come close to Artificial Intelligence or at least good guessing. They do legato and staccato automatically, you can create choir-libs where you can give text and they sing it etc.

So around the wave playback part (or sf2 or gig or whatever) there is lot of custom code that tweaks and decides in realtime.

Is Euphoria in the line of this and can rival Kontakt or Halion or is another Linuxsampler?

[jeffh]

WTF are you on about? That has to make it on the all-time failed trolling list in the history of the int3rw3bz

Maybe you should actually try my sampler first, then develop an actual critique about what it doesn't yet do that you wish it would. Then, and only then, offer your feedback to me, which I will either accept or reject based on my opinion of it's merit. Then, through the beauty of FOSS, you or anybody else can fork my work, or make a competing work if you don't like how I'm running my project. Forking is a basic freedom I gave to you when I GPL licensed my project. You're welcome.

I'm not going to attempt to decipher whatever it was you just said, although I will say this much:

I currently make music in Windows (still), using Reaper as my DAW, and Kontakt4 as my sampler. I mainly make use of Kontakt, even though many of the samples I am making myself in Massive, Absynth or FM8(because you can do different things in sampler than with a synthesizer, especially for gritty dubstep bass, etc...). Linux had no sampler that was sufficiently full featured for my needs. However, with the advancement in Euphoria, it now covers nearly every important feature of Kontakt that's needed for actually making music. Now, Kontakt does have features that Euphoria doesn't, and a slicker GUI, but Euphoria now covers all of the basics (and even some of the advanced features) pretty well. Combined with Muse2's recent release, I may just be able to start making music my way in Linux.

Now, if you reckon I wrote a very full-featured sampler from nothing in less than 4 months (including basically taking 2 of those months off), how advanced do you think it will be in a year? Of course, you don't actually know how advanced Euphoria is, because you haven't actually tried it, you're just trolling.

[nils]

I will be nice and ignore the trolling accusations.

Yes, I have tried it but I haven't looked at the code and I don't know what is possible and not shown in the GUI.
From what I have seen: Nice plugin, but you could also write an sfz file into Linuxsampler which does the same and more. But that is not the matter here, not at all (since I am not a Linuxsampler fanboy and this is not a comparison).

What matters is: You have created a program/plugin with Euphoria that loads audio files and maps them to midi key numbers. That is good and useful. But even if I envision the progress in one year it will still be that basic principle. Loading recorded audio files and doing some real time audio tweaks when played back through midi.

This is neither new (in Linux) nor is it state of the art IF, and I can't stress the importance of that "if" enough, you compare yourself with state of the art software like Kontakt and Halion. Or any sampler plugin else which does more than playing back recorded audio. (5 years old, still without comparison in Linux: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI5Gg2-mhmU )

What I think is that you make a mistake here by using the word "sampler". Yes, technically it is a sampler, but it does what every hardware keyboard in the 80s already did. And let me repeat it again: What you did is useful and it might be indeed the best implementation to do what it should do.

The problem is your choice of words. If you compare "Samplers" today you don't compare the simple ones, you compare and compete with the big fat plugins which try to tell us we need a more complex version of the same every year, as you wrote in your philosophy readme.

And stop with the glorifying yourself. If you do marketing speech like "king" and calling your own releases "exciting" then you must prepare to be judged by that standard. Maybe you are exited, that is good, but leave it to others if this is the exiting king or just a boring pawn.

Say what it is in reality without bragging and it will be better for all people. Look what bragging did to OpenOctave, it is the laughing stock of the Linux Audio world.

P.S. Please use the host systems color scheme

[jeffh]

I will be nice and ignore the trolling accusations.

Whatever, troll.

Yes, I have tried it but I haven't looked at the code and I don't know what is possible and not shown in the GUI.
From what I have seen: Nice plugin, but you could also write an sfz file into Linuxsampler which does the same and more. But that is not the matter here, not at all (since I am not a Linuxsampler fanboy and this is not a comparison).

What matters is: You have created a program/plugin with Euphoria that loads audio files and maps them to midi key numbers. That is good and useful. But even if I envision the progress in one year it will still be that basic principle. Loading recorded audio files and doing some real time audio tweaks when played back through midi.

Clearly you haven't tried it, or you wouldn't be doing such a generic analysis of it. According to my download counter, all 4 of the 12.07 packages have 1 combined download; and that was me testing to make sure the upload worked. So, you certainly haven't tried the latest release, and I never proclaimed any of the last 3 releases of it to be "king of Linux samplers"(tm), so no, you're lying, and you have no opinion to base your trolling on.l

And stop with the glorifying yourself. If you do marketing speech like "king" and calling your own releases "exciting" then you must prepare to be judged by that standard. Maybe you are exited, that is good, but leave it to others if this is the exiting king or just a boring pawn.

Seriously, what's even lamer is a nobody like you with that pathetic project like yours trying to tell me how to conduct myself. Maybe you should try harder to make something that people actually care about, rather than having an emotional meltdown because somebody dares to proclaim something they made to *gasp* actually be good?

So I invest a lot of my personal time, effort and skill(the same skills that are worth 6-figures USD to my employer in real life) into giving the Linux audio community something they've never had before. How on earth do you spread the word and convince people to try it without "glorifying" it? Would you prefer a nice humble headline like:

"U can haz sampler"
"It's not much, but I made a sampler"
"Notice: I made a sampler, but you don't have to use it"

Seriously, if you don't agree it's the king of Linux samplers, that's up to you. You're even free to say so in this very thread, but your you haven't even tried it to make that determination. By the same token, I am 100% free to suggest that may be the case. If it's not the king of Linux samplers, then please tell me which one is so that I can give it an honest evalution, then eat my words, publicly. Go ahead, I'm waiting...

P.S. Please use the host systems color scheme

Who are you to say that's best? Should Kontakt have used the default Windows color scheme? Sorry dude, your opinion only matters to you.

[jeffh]

For anybody else that's reading this thread and being subjected to Nils' feelings of inadequacy, this is his "awesome" competing project by which he derrives the moral authority to tell me what I should be doing:

http://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=8174

Mind blowing stuff, mate, well done.

That was the quickest git clone I've ever done. My project takes minutes to clone, yours cloned in 2 seconds. You've written ~400 lines of python. Congrats dude, sorry I ever doubted you.

By contrast, Euphoria had about 4000 lines of code churn since the last release alone, and over 10,000 lines of code churn since I founded it. I think I've earned the right to acknowledge publicly that it's a decent piece of kit.

[nils]

I am sorry your pride is hurt.
Please go on writing software. I have said it once and I will repeat it again: Your software is useful.

P.S. check the download counter on the source package.

[jeffh]

I am sorry your pride is hurt.

My pride is just fine, thanks. I have every right to retaliate against people trolling in my thread, that's just part of the internet law of the jungle. I've enjoyed a good flame war since back in the 90's, your welcome to continue making a fool out of yourself, and I'll keep replying. By artificially inflating the post count in my thread like you're doing, it's just going to make the thread look more popular than it is, thusly drawing people to click on it and maybe even download my software.

Thanks for the free advertising, but don't ever ask me any favors of me.

(edit: minor censorship by raboof)

[jeffh]

cmon people, get along...

@jeffh: sourceforge download details are sometimes not updated frequently (can take up to a full day).
Also, your project is on git so he could have used that...

geez...

No, he takes such great offense to my thread because he has a competing little add-on doohickey for LinuxSampler, and he'd hate for the incredible effort he put into those ~400 lines of Python to be made obsolete by another product. That's like complaining about a Toyota commerical with "OMFG, who are they to say they make the most reliable vehicles? How dare they try to "glorify" their cars, that's just wrong"

I guarantee you that he didn't try it, otherwise he would've had a better analysis than "it's nice, but the concept still sucks because it's 'just playing samples'(wtf???), and I'm not entirely sure of what it can do outside of the GUI. Needs m0ar fairy dust". Seriously, it made no sense, you could apply that same analysis to any sampler.

[jeffh]

cmon people, get along...

@jeffh: sourceforge download details are sometimes not updated frequently (can take up to a full day).
Also, your project is on git so he could have used that...

geez...

No, he takes such great offense to my thread because he has a competing little add-on doohickey for LinuxSampler, and he'd hate for the incredible effort he put into those ~400 lines of Python to be made obsolete by another product. That's like complaining about a Toyota commerical with "OMFG, who are they to say they make the most reliable vehicles? How dare they try to "glorify" their cars, that's just wrong"
.

His little tool is not competition, and read that again - little tool. It's just a handy set of scripts, pretty much like the 'mksfz.sh' script.
Your competition is Halion and Kontakt as you say.

in any case, I never see OpenSource projects as competetion (it's all open!).
If Qtractor gets a new feature - great! maybe it's something I can borrow for my own projects. A new session manager comes to try to replace others - cool, another one to the mix, let's see what's better and maybe implement the new ideas on the old session managers.

I don't understand why you are so upset, he's just saying you're bragging a little bit too much (which I agree), and that those products yourself are trying to compete with have a lot of features yours don't (which is true).
Also, Linux users tend to prefer interfaces with the desktop theme rather than a forced one, even if that means an uglier interface (subject to users' opinion).

No, I'm not "bragging" too much. If I proclaimed that Ray-V was "OMGZ, THE GREATEST SYNTHESIZER EVAR, YOU CAN FINALLY THROW AWAY YOUR OLD MINIMOOG", then that would be making an arse of myself, it's not that good and I know it. I have no delusions of grandeur about any of my work.

However, the latest Euphoria justifies a headline that boasts a little, it's actually pretty good. Therefore, I should actually be trying to convince people to give it a try, rather than failing to get the word out like the Muse2 devs. I have no affiliation with them (they don't even like me, and that's after a $250 donation), but IMHO they have, by far, the best DAW on Linux right now.... and almost nobody has tried it or even knows that the 2.0 release is out for almost 2 weeks now, because they utterly fail at advertising. I even thought about making an announcement on here for them, but it's not really my place.

So if this thread gets replies from 50 people and still nobody has bothered to actually download try Euphoria, then that's everybody else's loss. But you can't say that I at least didn't at least make an attempt to draw awareness to it, which involves proclaiming that the project has merit.

PS: I write all of this software for my own personal use, and I don't care if I have exactly zero other people using it. If people can't read a self-promoting headline without crying behind their keyboard, then that's they're problem. People like Nils could at least show some respect for me spending so much time and effort addressing some serious gaps in the Linux audio stack, and being kind enough to share my work. I've even gone out of my way to make the code modular and reusable by others. How many Linux audio plugin projects are being actively developed right now? 3 or 4? Seriously, don't bite the hand that feeds you...

EDIT: Futhermore, there are obviously social risks in putting such a bold headline on the thread, clearly I was willing to put my money where my mouth is on this one. Notice that the preceding 5 LMS Suite releases didn't have nearly as bold of a headline. The risk is that if it's not so good, people are going to call you on it. The reward is that if it is as good as I say, I will have drawn a lot of attention to it. I absolutely stand by the "king of Linux samplers" proclamation, and the 2 people calling me on it haven't actually tried it yet to suggest otherwise.

But like I said, I don't care if my project is in zero repositories, zero live CDs, averages zero weekly downloads on Sourceforge and everybody on LinuxMusicians hates me. So if people want to cry about my thread title without even trying my software, that's just fine with me. The most you'll accomplish is that I'll stop trying to promote my project on here.

[brummer]

[. . . ]People like Nils could at least show some respect for me spending so much time and effort addressing some serious gaps in the Linux audio stack, and being kind enough to share my work.[. . . ]

I didn't see any disrespect in what Nils wrote, but that may be because of my limited knowledge of the English language. Some critical questions, witch you fail to answer by the way, but not more.
I'm also interested in hear witch feature makes your sampler to the "king"? and, yes, I haven't test it, I just ask for some more information about it.

Anyhow, what you like to receive from others, you must also give.
Nils gives us nice applications over the last years and is a respected developer in the linux audio community. Some examples are here
http://www.denemo.org/HomePage
http://www.laborejo.org/
Additional he create a set of handy tools, so please Jeff, respect and become a respected .

[StudioDave]

Hi Jeff,

In the Comments to my last article for LWN you can read a note from a fellow who asked about support for major sample libraries in Linux samplers. I replied, but then I felt I was a bit out of my depth so I asked an orchestral composer - who uses Linux in his work - to describe the situation the way he sees it. His reply was not exactly encouraging.

In his opinion, samplers - kings, queens, courtiers, whatever - aren't our problem. Support for king-sized sample libraries is the problem, and there appears to be no good solution at this time. Kontakt's format includes features not found in simple WAV files, and it is just those features that users need. (IIUC the format includes information about how the sample can be played, how it can receive articulations, what loop points exist, tuning information, etc., but I'm guessing here, I don't use things like the VSL).

In the end my respondent advises using a Windows box running Kontakt or a similar sampler as an external sound source. He indicated - unhappily indicated, I might add - that until Linux gains direct support for the most popular sample formats we're forced to use either relatively inflexible WAV files or unsatisfactory SF2/SFZ files. Now, I know a great deal of good work can be done with those formats, but from what I understand they do not support features that have become expected in the major proprietary formats, features especially desired by orchestral composers and others who need the full range of conventional instruments and their articulations.

Re: Euphoria: It is shaping up nicely, and I hope more users find out about it. The built-in processors are most welcome. Here are a few other features you might consider adding:

Time-stretching/pitch-shifting.
Add/remove/edit loop points.
Beat recognition/slicing.
Plugin support.
Multisample layering (i.e. a single slot holds more than one sample).
Various GUI improvements (piano keyboard for mapping samples, knobs/sliders for parameter adjustments)
Support for commercial sample formats (I know, I'm dreaming out loud here.)
Other UI improvements (i.e. a general configuration dialog).
A bulk sample loader script would make it much easier to set up very complex sample arrangements.

You may have some of this stuff already working or on the design board, and of course some of it can be done with the external editor. I'm still getting into Euphoria, haven't discovered all its possibilities yet. Btw, I'm using it with mhWaveEdit now, thanks for the config file.

Best regards,

Dave Phillips

[raboof]

In jack-dssi-host (which Euphoria uses for standalone mode), Euphoria works 100% perfectly, and stable. Since jack-dssi-host is the reference implementation of a DSSI host written by the DSSI folks themselves, I think it's fair to say that if something works there, it should work anywhere. Having said that, I spent endless amounts of time petitioning various DAW developers to take a closer look at their DSSI implementations, and even making multi-hundred-dollar donations to their projects. My efforts have consistently been meet with "well, [insert name of overly-simple existing DSSI plugin] works, so it must be your code"

To be fair, the arguments 'my plugin works in jack-dssi-host so it should work anywhere' and 'CALF works in my host so any proper plugin should work in it' are basically equally flawed.

It's unfortunate you ran into DAW developers unwilling to help debug the problem, and they might even have been rude about it, but throwing their own flawed argument back at them doesn't seem productive.

It makes sense to advertise that the plugin is not supported in any of those DAW's until somebody steps up and actually looks into the problem. I'd prefer to hear about it with less drama, myself, though .