LinuxMusicians

-- tl;dr

Cataloguing the classic soundfont files from hammersound.net here https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts ... ammersound

-- The full story

So, I've sent an email to the owner of Hammersound last year about helping him mirroring the files and helping preserving them. I've had no answer and recently the site seems to have gone down.

Seeing as I have most of the files on my hard disk and there are some mirrors of the files floating around I've started the work of scraping the whole site's contents from the latest version saved by http://archive.org (https://web.archive.org/web/20150314191 ... sound.com/) and posting them to https://musical-artifacts.com .

The first batch is here, mostly the soundfonts created by Thomas Hammer himself https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts ... ammersound

The bulk of the files "The SoundFont Library" is coming soon, but I'll take a little more time to try and recover as much files as possible
and convert the .sfpack and .sfark files back to sf2. Also a preliminary analysis shows some of the files hosted outside of hammersound are gone
and were not saved Internet Archive, so they may be lost if I can't find it in my files. I'll probably make a list of missing stuff if someone thinks it's worth trying to find them somewhere.

Why go through all this effort if these files are floating around the net already?

With this I hope these are searchable and more browsable. I've extracted most of the metadata from the files and tagged them with some keywords taken from the descriptions. One thing I've always found difficult in soundfont collection sites is sorting through all the clutter and finding the 'good stuff'. I've still got a long way to go to solve that on Musical Artifacts, but I think it's a start. Also if some other developer wants to sort through the files, the site has a json api https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts ... ammersound !

Finally, I've sent another email to Thomas recently and I'm still waiting to hear back. I'm willing to help him preserve all the stuff he's got up there. Hammersound is a classic site and one of the first ones which I used to download soundfonts way back when I first started messing around with midi files so this is kind of a big deal to me.

Thanks for reading

Hey lfz,

A great initiative ! I made a lot of use of Hammersound back in the day, nice to see someone cares enough to curate the collection. As I recall, it was a massive group of soundfonts, so bless your head for taking on the task.

Best,

dp

Very cool, thanks for your hard work!

lfz wrote:One thing I've always found difficult in soundfont collection sites is sorting through all the clutter and finding the 'good stuff'

+1
with soundfonts you might find a few really great patches in the same bank as a lot of stinky ones. Perhaps there could be some way to allow users to indicate whats good about it in a single sentence review, then report the most used words or something? Just thinking aloud here...

Its great that you are working on this. Thanks.

ssj71 wrote:

lfz wrote:One thing I've always found difficult in soundfont collection sites is sorting through all the clutter and finding the 'good stuff'

+1
with soundfonts you might find a few really great patches in the same bank as a lot of stinky ones. Perhaps there could be some way to allow users to indicate whats good about it in a single sentence review, then report the most used words or something? Just thinking aloud here...

Its great that you are working on this. Thanks.

+1 Kudos to you lfz !!

I also agree with ssj71, large Soundfonts like Fluid, Bellatrix etc. are maddeningly variable in quality, Some of them are massive and have 'Casio-reject-quality' FM crap mixed in with actual instrument sampled instrument files. Some of the large GM libraries like SGM and 'Weeds" are/were also geared to gamers and what gamers consider to be good sounds are not often in the same universe of what musicians are looking for.. It's too bad that Soundfonts have a bad reputation and that there are so many that fall in the horrid-to-mediocre spectrum because essentially they are just a wrapper for samples in a pretty universal format across platforms and with good samples there is potential for equivalent quality to specialized proprietary formats.

Anyway a 'combed-through' database of 'good' SF2's would be a real asset.

ssj71 wrote: Perhaps there could be some way to allow users to indicate whats good about it in a single sentence review, then report the most used words or something? Just thinking aloud here...

That's a good idea, I may try this in the future. It also occurred to me to scrape all of hammersounds' soundfont reviews and make this kind of word map for each one of them, this may help surface some good ones.

Yes, great initiative!
I was Friday looking on musical artifacts and was thinking mister Hammer,
Has been quite busy.
All try them out later.

Arthur

Hi lfz,
Also listened to your 4 guitar layers on your blog.
Sounds really interesting.
Gonna try it myself.

Hi Thanks
i tried a few of your hammer sounds and they are great.
Sound like a long forgotten time, coming back.
Gonna try a few others on musical-artifacts.

ARthur

Arthurx wrote:Hi Thanks
i tried a few of your hammer sounds and they are great.
Sound like a long forgotten time, coming back.
Gonna try a few others on musical-artifacts.

ARthur

Yeah, some of those sounds are really great. My favorite so far is the Vintage Dreams Soundfont (https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/248). Really good electronic sounds there and I've been playing around with them a lot! Here's a little demo https://soundcloud.com/lfzawacki/when-i-want-you-to-wip

BTW, the scraping work is mostly done I'll have more things to show in the next few days, it's just that right I've been busy with other projects

Thanks for all the sounds you found.
Yeah, it is an electronic piece your "I want you to...,"
It are a kind of full warm and ever changing sounds.
Actually a lot like my ensoniq, some even better.
Cheers I gonna check out the other sounds in a month or so,
We first go to China; my son is gonna marry there.
All the best
Arthur

Ok, I've reached the next phase in the process and I need some help now. Here is a a spreadsheet with all the soundfonts I could recover from the archive:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

I've taken a long time searching my folders and crawling the internet and archive.org to recover most of the files and then converting them to sf2 format (no sfark, sfpack or .sbk). As you will see, each row is a file with it's description, author, relevant links and extensive information gathered from the site.

For this next step I'd invite anyone interested to read through the spreadsheet and find the most interesting files, fill in tags for each of them, write considerations about the good soundfonts and link to newer versions if they're being hosted somewhere else.

To help you in this task each row has the following extra information: file rank / number of reviews, top review title words, top review words, a link to the archived review page, author page and a download URL. If we're able to dig up a good documented file collection it will have been worth it. Extra information is the license (most are copyrighted to the authors, but some where put under public domain) and whether the file is missing.

To help just open the spreadsheet and ask for permission to edit. My apologies for people who don't like google services or don't have an account, but this is the quickest way right now for me to organize an effort like this.

Thanks for reading and I hope this works

No takers on this? I'll probably get back to this project some time in the future, but right now I'm a little burned up from sorting through so many files...

Anyway, even if you're not up to the task of documenting these files don't miss this spreadsheet. 300+ sound libraries with every last drop of meta-data I could squeeze from the archive

Added a few more of the ones which had Public Domain licenses. I tested them all and tried to only include the usable ones and added some comments where it made sense.

Try it: https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts ... ammersound

Thank you so much for all of these great soundfonts. Just downloaded most of these.

Sincerely,

aicram