LinuxMusicians

Qualitymix wrote:when creating the samples...whats the best way to enable continuous looping when the key is either held down or the sustain pedal is held?

Seriously, the best way is to have me do it for you. You need to have lots of experience in looping in order to know how to create seamless loops. (I've been doing this stuff for many years). It involves the following skills:

1) Being so accustomed to a graphical waveform display that you can quickly recognize/choose two points in the waveform with the most similiarity (ie, similiar slopes and freq content around those points).
2) Knowing how to use compression, filtering, tuning, and noise reduction to reduce discrepancies within the area between those 2 points (i.e. in the entire loop).
2) Knowing how to manually crossfade those 2 points.

Each of the above are acquired skills. And you must be good at all three.

I've never done a video tutorial before, but if I decide to do one, this would be my choice since you really need to watch how it's done to learn it. There's no way I can post a forum message that's going to be any practical help to you for learning how to loop samples.

j_e_f_f_g wrote: I've never done a video tutorial before, but if I decide to do one, this would be my choice since you really need to watch how it's done to learn it.

That would be great!

I've never been able to produce a decent loop :-/

I understand that aspect of it. I'm not asking how to make a perfect sound. All I want to know is how to make it happen in the sfz file.

You could try polyphone which has a good auto-looping.

how to make a loop happen in the sfz file.

Just save the loop in the wave file. (Don't use Audacity). The sfz player (linuxsampler, sforzando) will detect the loop, and automatically loop that wave (unless you disable that behavior by specifying loop_mode=no_loop). If you save a wave without a loop, the sfz player won't loop it.

Every sfz player is supposed to do this.

If you have a non-looped wave that is supposed to naturally fade out, such as most drums like cymbals, tom, kick, snare, then specify loop_mode=one_shot. If that wave does have a loop (looped cymbal), then instead specify ampeg_sustain=.001 and set ampeg_decay= and ampeg_release= so you get the desired length of fade. (Start with ampeg_decay=30 and ampeg_release=30. If too long a fade, substitue a value between 1 and 29. If too short a fade, substitue a value between 31 and 60.)

Thanks. All my work with SFZs has always been with drums, so it's always been loop_mode=one_shot.
Specifically what I was looking for was how to use the loop_start and loop_end opcodes...but I've got that figured out as well.
As it turns out, the sounds on this keyboard lend themselves perfectly to the Soundfont format. There are maybe two velocity layers for any given patch, and maybe only 2 or 3 different samples that get modulated up and down the keyboard, making it extremely easy to import the samples into Swami, calculate the loop, and just set the sustain/decay parameters.

You don't need to set loop_start and loop_end. The player will get that info from the wave file.