Re: [fluid-dev] hauptwerk

[Josh Green]

On Sun, 2007-07-29 at 23:08 -0500, Bert Douglas wrote:
> Can fluidsynth work as a substitute for Hauptwerk?
> Not interested in gui.
> Just about possibility to accept large sample sets.
> 
> Hauptwerk samples are stored in lots of separate wav files, one for each 
> note and stop on organ.  Samples are often 30 seconds long each before 
> the repeat point.  Memory consumed is in gigabytes.
> 
> Would it be possible to convert Hauptwerk samples to sound font, without 
> hitting any size limitation?
> 
> Any advice on how to do this?
> 
> Thanks,
> Bert Douglas
> 

Hello,

I'm not familiar with this instrument format.  From an initial search it
looked to be mostly used for organ sounds?  A format like that which
consumes several gigabytes is likely doing streaming of the samples
instead of storing them all in RAM.  FluidSynth does not yet have
streaming support, although it could be added (its high on the TODO
list).  As for converting to SoundFont files, that is likely not a good
idea.  SoundFont has a file size limit of 4GB or perhaps even 2GB if
signed integers are used on the host OS for file operations.  What could
make sense is to add support for Hauptwerk patches to libInstPatch.  The
idea being that FluidSynth can support other formats (as long as they
fit within the SoundFont synthesis model adequately), by using
libInstPatch.  I'd like to see what the actual format looks like though,
to decide if it seemed like a worthwhile task.

I've been caught up in other work lately and have had very little time
for FluidSynth/libInstPatch/Swami/et al.  I'm looking forward to
returning to this in a month or so, when my current job is finished.
Apologies to the rest of the FluidSynth devel subscribers for neglecting
to respond to posts.  Looks like there is a back log of those to go
through :)
        Josh