Electric Bass Sfz Instrument

[j_e_f_f_g]

Take a look at Unfas video about Virtually Playing Orchestra... using these legally would be nightmare.

Unfa's video is a bit heavy on the doomsday alarmist tone. I've never heard anyone demand his picture appear on someone's album cover art due to the use of samples. "Attribution" doesn't mean you need to expend a lot of time and effort unnecessarily labeling and collating materials. It just means you can't conceal nor misrepresent the origin of the material. This is accomplished by simply copying the license file(s) that accompany the source material. That's why I organized everything into folders based upon license terms -- so that it would be simple/quick to copy the needed license(s) to your final work. One folder = one license = one SFZ articulation.

It's no different than using GPL source code from numerous parties. You can't distribute derived software without giving "attribution" (ie, attaching the GPL license) of each source material.

It's true that some CC licenses are more liberal than others. For example, some forbid using the material for commercial purposes. But in the case of NBO, it's not a "nightmare" to deal with various licenses. You've got to open its folder to load an SFZ file, and the license file is right there. Read it. If that's too much work, then spend $500 on some commercially licensed product (with dongle).

[tavasti]

Unfa's video is a bit heavy on the doomsday alarmist tone. I've never heard anyone demand his picture appear on someone's album cover art due to the use of samples. "Attribution" doesn't mean you need to expend a lot of time and effort unnecessarily labeling and collating materials. It just means you can't conceal nor misrepresent the origin of the material. This is accomplished by simply copying the license file(s) that accompany the source material. That's why I organized everything into folders based upon license terms -- so that it would be simple/quick to copy the needed license(s) to your final work. One folder = one license = one SFZ articulation.

It's no different than using GPL source code from numerous parties. You can't distribute derived software without giving "attribution" (ie, attaching the GPL license) of each source material.

It's true that some CC licenses are more liberal than others. For example, some forbid using the material for commercial purposes. But in the case of NBO, it's not a "nightmare" to deal with various licenses. You've got to open its folder to load an SFZ file, and the license file is right there. Read it. If that's too much work, then spend $500 on some commercially licensed product (with dongle).

I release my music to spotify with routenote. There is no possibility for attribution. So when using some samples that need for attribution I am legally not allowed to use them in such music.

[j_e_f_f_g]

There is no possibility for attribution.

Then that's a limitation of the distribution network. The world is full of compromises, especially when something is "free".

[Largos]

It'd be easier to say "Don't use these in music you want to release" because that's the practical implication of having a clusterfuck of multiple licenses, if at all, in one sfz. That whole folder you linked is a mess. The honkytonk instrument has four licenses, attribution and CC 0, how is that working? There's even a version of the pink panther theme. I am guessing to be played when you have to inspect every sub folder for a license.

The electric bass instrument of the OP has no custom license, so whoever made it owns up to 50% of any song it's used in.

[GMaq]

It'd be easier to say "Don't use these in music you want to release" because that's the practical implication of having a clusterfuck of multiple licenses, if at all, in one sfz. That whole folder you linked is a mess. The honkytonk instrument has four licenses, attribution and CC 0, how is that working? There's even a version of the pink panther theme. I am guessing to be played when you have to inspect every sub folder for a license.

The electric bass instrument of the OP has no custom license, so whoever made it owns up to 50% of any song it's used in.

I don't know about the license particulars...

I will say as someone who has done only a few sample libs myself.. (my God am I coming to the defense of j_e_f_f_g!!?) I don't think I could even guess the amount of hours and time that went into even one of those SFZ libs that Jeff has done... He didn't just take somebody else's work and run a converter on it from one format to the other and put it out, he has taken countless free libs, abandonware, open-source stuff and cracked them open, extracted the samples, fixed the samples, relooped the samples, retuned the samples, improved the samples and reconstituted them into a pretty surprisingly good set of SFZ's

Everybody bitches about how we have no good samples and libs in Linux so somebody (and of course other somebodies) have been trying to do something about that even if the sources aren't pristine and of potentially dubious origins that doesn't mean they are overtly illegal either. I would guess most of the resampling and editing Jeff has done would make them unrecognizable to the source authors even IF and that's a huge IF they cared about their years old freely distributed and abandoned wares being used in the first place.

Years ago I got a few really good commercial soundfonts from Sonido Media which they stopped selling and distributing, I contacted them multiple times and asked them if they would consider releasing them to the open-source realm and received no reply even though the company was still in business. So if years later I find those libs for download on a bedroom producers Blog or something like that and I know the company has both abandoned them and won't answer queries about legal use I wouldn't think twice about using them!

Legally perhaps not... but the company obviously doesn't care..? Nobody will be coming to knock on anyone's door... These are the compromises of which Jeff is speaking.. It's one thing to raise a concern but to flippantly call someone else's countless hours of work a 'clusterfuck' is a bit harsh, My God he put every license he could track down in the bundle at least even if they were contradictory or potentially ratted him out! There's Warez and Reg key hacking etc... That is outright theft! What we're talking about here isn't even in the same universe as that and certainly doesn't need to be played up as such..

[j_e_f_f_g]

The honkytonk instrument has four licenses

Of the samples that aren't original material, the majority of them come from freesound.org, of which the honkytonk piano is an example. At that time, freesound had just implemented a license.txt generating script that had a bug which caused all possible license options to be listed, instead of the correct one chosen by the uploader. (ie, You couldn't determine the actual license.) So that's a bug in that license.txt which will need to be fixed. But that is not representative of the remainder of the license.txt files, and it should not be implied otherwise.

The electric bass instrument of the OP has no custom license, so whoever made it owns up to 50% of any song it's used in.

Where did you get this legal advice?? First of all, copyrights are not treated the same way in every possible jurisdiction, so blanket statements like the above are seldom ever true. Secondly, I've read copyright case decisions from USA courts that contradict the above. For example, Rob Van Winkle (Vanilla Ice) was sued for using a sample of Queen/Bowie's "Under Pressure" without obtaining any license to do so. He lost the case, but the resulting remedy was not that Queen/Bowie ended by owning 50% of "Ice ice, baby". So in what jurisdiction(s) is your above statement legally applicable? Did you get this from an attorney specializing in copyright law?

==================

I have addressed the matter of the No Budget soundsets' licensing and usage numerous times before, and I always say the same thing as I said earlier. The purpose of these is to provide the best sounding instruments using freely available sources. If there's a choice between two sample sets where one has CC0 and the other has an attribution stipulation, or a commercial restriction, or some sort of usage limitation, I will still choose the latter if it "sounds better". The intent is to address the needs of people who want "the best-sounding free instruments" -- not the needs of people who don't want to deal with copyrights.

These limitations don't concern me because I have no intentions of selling my music, nor taking credit for someone else's work, or otherwise doing things that would violate the license terms or require unrestricted rights. For people whose needs are likewise, they should have nothing to fear from using the No Budget series because the licenses are all laid out for them. OTOH, if someone needs to have unrestricted legal rights to source material, then he must do the following:

1) Purchase unrestricted rights directly from the copyright holder (or an "agent" of the copyright holder, such as his publisher).
2) Before releasing a work using copyrighted material, get that work accessed by an attorney specializing in copyright law (and licensed in the jurisdiction where you reside) to ensure you're in compliance.

Anything less than that means that you've not done the necessary due diligence to ensure that you're not violating copyrights. I dislike folks who complain about others' approach to licensing (for example, the "license police") when those folks fail to do what needs to be done to ensure their own compliance. Those people have no moral high ground from which to lecture others about copyright compliance, and they should stop doing that immediately.

[Largos]

I don't know about the license particulars...

I will say as someone who has done only a few sample libs myself.. (my God am I coming to the defense of j_e_f_f_g!!?) I don't think I could even guess the amount of hours and time that went into even one of those SFZ libs that Jeff has done... He didn't just take somebody else's work and run a converter on it from one format to the other and put it out, he has taken countless free libs, abandonware, open-source stuff and cracked them open, extracted the samples, fixed the samples, relooped the samples, retuned the samples, improved the samples and reconstituted them into a pretty surprisingly good set of SFZ's

Everybody bitches about how we have no good samples and libs in Linux so somebody (and of course other somebodies) have been trying to do something about that even if the sources aren't pristine and of potentially dubious origins that doesn't mean they are overtly illegal either. I would guess most of the resampling and editing Jeff has done would make them unrecognizable to the source authors even IF and that's a huge IF they cared about their years old freely distributed and abandoned wares being used in the first place.

Years ago I got a few really good commercial soundfonts from Sonido Media which they stopped selling and distributing, I contacted them multiple times and asked them if they would consider releasing them to the open-source realm and received no reply even though the company was still in business. So if years later I find those libs for download on a bedroom producers Blog or something like that and I know the company has both abandoned them and won't answer queries about legal use I wouldn't think twice about using them!

Legally perhaps not... but the company obviously doesn't care..? Nobody will be coming to knock on anyone's door... These are the compromises of which Jeff is speaking.. It's one thing to raise a concern but to flippantly call someone else's countless hours of work a 'clusterfuck' is a bit harsh, My God he put every license he could track down in the bundle at least even if they were contradictory or potentially ratted him out! There's Warez and Reg key hacking etc... That is outright theft! What we're talking about here isn't even in the same universe as that and certainly doesn't need to be played up as such..

It is a clusterfuck. It's not demeaning anyone's effort to say it would be clearer for people using it if sfz's didn't contain multiple licenses. Nor saying that putting them in a directory alongside illegally distributed copyrighted works is a mess. All of this makes it harder than it needs to be if you were intending to use those sounds in a work you'd release to others.

My suggestion is just:
1. Make one license per sfz file. With the license details at the top level.
2. Don't distribute via a directory, use a html page and then you could annotate the link with license details.

[j_e_f_f_g]

illegally distributed copyrighted works

What "illegally distributed copyrighted works" are you referring to? If that allegation is directed at me, you're dangerously close to committing libel. You better have your "facts" correct, and those facts had better be a whole lot more accurate than your "50% ownership" allegation above.

[Largos]

Where did you get this legal advice?? First of all, copyrights are not treated the same way in every possible jurisdiction, so blanket statements like the above are seldom ever true. Secondly, I've read copyright case decisions from USA courts that contradict the above. For example, Rob Van Winkle (Vanilla Ice) was sued for using a sample of Queen/Bowie's "Under Pressure" without obtaining any license to do so. He lost the case, but the resulting remedy was not that Queen/Bowie ended by owning 50% of "Ice ice, baby". So in what jurisdiction(s) is your above statement legally applicable? Did you get this from an attorney specializing in copyright law?

The vanilla ice thing was settled out of court. That said, what I said was wrong. Such copyright infringement is more often settled with large fines and injunctions.

==================

I have addressed the matter of the No Budget soundsets' licensing and usage numerous times before, and I always say the same thing as I said earlier. The purpose of these is to provide the best sounding instruments using freely available sources. If there's a choice between two sample sets where one has CC0 and the other has an attribution stipulation, or a commercial restriction, or some sort of usage limitation, I will still choose the latter if it "sounds better". The intent is to address the needs of people who want "the best-sounding free instruments" -- not the needs of people who don't want to deal with copyrights.

These limitations don't concern me because I have no intentions of selling my music, nor taking credit for someone else's work, or otherwise doing things that would violate the license terms or require unrestricted rights. For people whose needs are likewise, they should have nothing to fear from using the No Budget series because the licenses are all laid out for them. OTOH, if someone needs to have unrestricted legal rights to source material, then he must do the following:

1) Purchase unrestricted rights directly from the copyright holder (or an "agent" of the copyright holder, such as his publisher).
2) Before releasing a work using copyrighted material, get that work accessed by an attorney specializing in copyright law (and licensed in the jurisdiction where you reside) to ensure you're in compliance.

Anything less than that means that you've not done the necessary due diligence to ensure that you're not violating copyrights. I dislike folks who complain about others' approach to licensing (for example, the "license police") when those folks fail to do what needs to be done to ensure their own compliance. Those people have no moral high ground from which to lecture others about copyright compliance, and they should stop doing that immediately.

I don't have an opinion on what licenses you use. All I say is they are not clearly labelled and putting them in sub folders of sfz files does not count as clear. Sounds from an instrument are not copyrightable. SFZ's are perceptually blurring the lines by presenting samples like a soundbank of a keyboard and a virtual instrument based on samples would do so even further.

It wouldn't fly if Korg put out a keyboard where every patch was actually a copyrighted sample and you had to look in the manual for each patches particular license. This is essentially what you are doing, which is fine if people just playing to themselves but it's not good for anyone who wants to use in work they want to distribute. That's why I said what I said.

[Largos]

illegally distributed copyrighted works

What "illegally distributed copyrighted works" are you referring to? If that allegation is directed at me, you're dangerously close to committing libel. You better have your "facts" correct, and those facts had better be a whole lot more accurate than your "50% ownership" allegation above.

pinkpanther.zip

[j_e_f_f_g]

pinkpanther.zip

First of all, I'm not distributing that. Secondly, the purpose of that piece was to provide a "demo update" of some sax and brass ensembles I created, and those are not "illegally distributed copyrighted works".

Stop before you commit libel.

[Largos]

Do you have the proper permission to use that theme? If so, sorry. If not, it's illegally on there.

[j_e_f_f_g]

Permission to use that theme?? You've been complaining about having to deal with multiple license terms/restrictions in NBO. And now, out of the blue, you're talking about publishing rights?? Those 2 things have no legal correlation at all!

Nevermind the fact that the pink panther arrangement is not even part of NBO, nor included with it. (I didn't even arrange it. It's a midi file I downloaded from a website, and played through nbo). How you've arrived at a conclusion that it's "alongside" NBO's folder hierarchy, and somehow makes it more difficult to use NBO is a complete mystery to me.

At this point, I'm unsure whether you're just out of your element and very confused, or whether you're arguing just for the sake of arguing. But this is not going well for you, so you should probably abandon this. It's starting to sound like Monty Python's Argument Clinic sketch, but not nearly as funny.

[Largos]

I was just giving you feedback and you start crying about libel. You're talking about others due diligence whilst being so senile I am having to remind you of what you've uploaded.

Are you really arguing that having a single license per sfz is not easier to understand or that indicating the license of an sfz prior to download on a webpage is not easier than requiring people to dig into subdirectories? If you keep needing to answer questions on them, maybe they are not clearly labelled, just maybe.

Something better can be done than putting a load of messy files (including pink panther music) in a web directory and linking to that. I spent a few minutes and made you a template, you can upgrade to web 1.0.

webplate.zip

(12.47 KiB) Downloaded 121 times

you're welcome

[kmturley]

@j_e_f_f_g I don't agree with Largos. He is making a big deal out of a small detail.

I went through the sounds at: http://www.bandshed.net/sounds/sfz/
They are an amazing collection of curated instruments. It must have taken you a long time and countless hours of hard work. Thank-you!

For StudioRack I have chosen to only including instruments which have a single permissive license. Libraries with multiple sample licenses, or missing licenses will create a headache for my audience. I'd prefer to keep it simple.

Therefore I have mirrored the following instruments:

AVL Drumkits
https://studiorack.github.io/studiorack ... l-drumkits
https://github.com/studiorack/avl-drumkits
https://github.com/studiorack/avl-drumk ... tag/v1.1.0

AVL Percussions
https://studiorack.github.io/studiorack ... ercussions
https://github.com/studiorack/avl-percussions
https://github.com/studiorack/avl-percu ... tag/v1.1.0

Salamander Drumkit
https://studiorack.github.io/studiorack ... er-drumkit
https://github.com/studiorack/salamander-drumkit
https://github.com/studiorack/salamande ... tag/v1.0.0

I updated the folder structure to match the common SFZ structure, converting samples to .flac and adding preview audio/image files. Lastly I added an automated pipeline which bundles the zip release automatically and also creates a "compact" version using .ogg files (for those who want to test out instruments and save download size/disk space)

Let me know if i've missed any SFZ instruments which could be included in StudioRack!