Re: [fluid-dev] SoundFont handling

[Josh Green]

I'm working to get Swami 2.0 released soon.  Its basically a redesign of
the older Swami 0.9.x and represents several years of development.  I
just never got around to the instability issues of Swami 0.9.x, due
mostly to neglect (much rather work on newer code than the older stuff).
Swami 2.0 aims to be a flexible environment for creating instruments and
I hope it satisfies.

One of the features which I'm working on is support for having an
instrument database which could synchronize with the online database at
http://sounds.resonance.org (not yet launched).  This could provide user
ratings which would be one way to weed out the crappy stuff.  I was
thinking it would be nice to use either MD5 sums to locate duplicate
samples and possibly some other audio signature algorithm to find
similar samples (possibly edited, etc).

One other feature which I think will be really useful to users is Python
scripting.  This should provide a flexible and easy to use way for users
to contribute complex editing/analysis operations.

I'll be sure to announce the release on fluid-dev and other channels
when its ready.

Cheers
        Josh


On Fri, 2008-04-18 at 11:14 -0500, S. Christian Collins wrote:
> Hi Lutz,
> 
> In answer to your #1, I have yet to find anything besides Swami that
> runs natively in Linux, and unfortunately, it's too unstable for me to
> use right now.  I have had to do all of my SoundFont editing from
> Windows using Vienna SoundFont Studio 2.  However, this program will
> only run if you have a qualifying Creative sound card, which is not
> properly detected under Wine.  I tried running another program, Viena
> (one 'n') under Wine, and it works for the most part, but crashes when
> saving or creating new files--which is a shame, since even the sound
> auditioning works under Linux.  Your mileage may vary
> (http://www.synthfont.com/).
> 
> In response to #2, there are a lot of badly designed SoundFont banks
> out there, and it would be nice to be able to sift through unnecessary
> instrument level duplications.  Unfortunately, I haven't found
> anything that can do this automatically.
> 
> -~Chris
> 
> Lutz Morelater wrote: 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > SoundFont files are an essential part for fluidsynth. I have two questions 
> > related to them.
> > 
> > 1.) I would like to know which is the cleverest way to work on them?
> > 
> > There is swami, I have used that, but swami is probably best for finetuning 
> > sounds and creating a SF2 file and not for reorganizing large soundbanks 
> > spread over several files. And swami has crashed on my laptop quite 
> > frequently when I was not doing much apart from browsing (listening) a few 
> > (two, three, four) SF2 files. There was no error message, it was just gone.
> > 
> > What I need is some way to handle SF2 files.
> > 
> > For example: I have downloaded several rather large GM compatible 
> > collections 
> > of sounds and now I want to keep only those instruments (presets) of them 
> > that really sound great to me. I am going to discard any drumset in a SF2 
> > file and create a seperate file for drumsets, and my soundbanks should have 
> > no more than 100 sounds each (that condition is caused by my MIDI hardware 
> > controller panel that is unable to select soundnumbers greater than 99).
> > 
> > I have found that the file size often is misleading, i.e. large files 
> > contain 
> > nice sounds and crappy sounds as well, as do small sized collections not 
> > only 
> > contain crappy sounds but also real gems.
> > 
> > So the question is how to effeciently reorder/resort/reorganize instruments 
> > so 
> > that I get my very own collection of sounds.
> > 
> > 2.) The next thing I need to know is if there is a tool that helps to 
> > identify 
> > doublettes of sounds. Many SF2 files contain similar or even identical 
> > instruments that differ from each other in hardly any detail, if at all. It 
> > would be great if a tool, fed with SF2 file names, could browse all presets 
> > in the files and remove all sounds that can already be found in one of the 
> > SF2 files checked.
> > 
> > Thanks for any help,
> > Lutz.
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > fluid-dev mailing list
> > address@hidden
> > http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-dev
> > 
> >   
> _______________________________________________
> fluid-dev mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-dev