LinuxMusicians

http://i.imgur.com/oKkoUuY.png

good...

what's that? An SFZ player? Without LinuxSampler backend?

I have made this topic my home page.

That is a sampler. It has nothing to do with Linuxsampler but has its own engine.

It works with its own file format which is basically sfz + meta-data + scripts (optional) + custom gui (optional).
So basically any .sfz instrument can be used after a mini-conversion (put it and its samples into a tar and a metadata.ini file, to get technical).

Everything is in one file. No separate sample dirs and instrument files. It supports multiple instruments per files as well.

The sampler will be free of charge and GPL. Although it is tempting to press money from the Open Source community for a product that is in dire need I consider this a vital piece of infrastructure and would rather see it that the market share is significant so people produce instruments.

This looks great - I like the idea of a single instrument file rather than folders full of samples. Thanks for all your hard work.

nilshi wrote:Although it is tempting to press money from the Open Source community for a product that is in dire need I consider this a vital piece of infrastructure and would rather see it that the market share is significant so people produce instruments.

While I don't know that I'd encourage "pressing money" from the community, I think developers deserve some compensation. Consider the financial models of Ardour, ZynAddSubFX, Linux Studio Plugins and the OpenAV system. All result in a source code release at some point but give the developer some funding even if short lived. My LushLife plugin funded very quickly because it was needed and was a positive experience for all IMO. If you are interested in more discussion I have lots of thoughts about it. Best of luck to you either way. Great to see work being done in this department!

Oh yes! It's time to eradicate LinuxSampler and enjoy the freedom! I'm hyped!

I think multiple instruments in a file is a very bad idea. You can't catalogue them. How do you manage to find what you want?

DAWs usually scan a directory with plugins and catalogue them by their filenames. If a filename does not indicate what the instrument is, then I'll rename it accordingly and have the DAW rescan the directory. Then the DAW provides a search box that lets me find all plugins with the instrument I want.

But if the name of the plugin does not reflect what it does, how am I supposed to find it?

I have that problem with zynaddsubfx all the time, because it loads sf2 files that may contain a large number of instruments, sometimes even weird effects. I remember some of them, but most will be lost in the haystack, wasted because there is absolutely no way I can catalogue the instruments. So I end up not using zynaddsubfx very often.

If you think it will get messy, that's what directories are for. You open a directory and it's full of files. What is wrong with that?

This is Linux/Unix we're talking about. "Everything is a file." And each tool does one job well, always meant to be connected to others.

You could build an internal catalogue, which will work fine... if you assume your plugin is the only one that the user will have or ever care about... which is typical of proprietary thinking. Windows and Apple live in their own blobs. Linux always presupposes interaction.

Yeah, I'd rather have the OS supplied "Pick a file" dialog box like in Qsampler.

Let me rephrase that.
Do you want staccato and sustain of the same physical (but recorded) instrument to be in the same file to load?
I assume yes. Currently these are likely all separate sfz files.
There are more usecases.

(A different topic is how the switching between those is done, but let me tell that another time.)

Loading collections of files, like "all Sonatina strings" is a different matter and just a short text file, basically a list of file names to load violins, viola, cello, bass at the same time. But you could load them individually as well.

nilshi wrote:staccato and sustain... how the switching between those is done

Use "Sound Variation" MIDI controller (cc #70 as I recall). I use it in NBO's "full" sfz files. For example, Violin\SoloViolin\violin_full.sfz uses cc #70 with a value of 0 to select sustain, a value of 2 to select pizzicato, a value of 3 to select tremulo, etc.

I don't think you can add CC# 70 in Rosegarden. I prefer each articulation on a different MIDI channel.

After seeing the HISE linux release today I am investigating if I need to work on a sampler at all. HISE looks fine (only had a superficial view) and I would rather concentrate my efforts on my notation sequencer Laborejo. So the tendency is that I will discontinue my work on my own sampler and instead support HISE. You will hear from me again soon here.