Re: [Linuxsampler-devel] status update for LinuxSampler -- GUI and native format

[Marek P. <ma...@na...>]

> 
> 3) a graphical editor that permits loading (through 1) ),creation and
> manipulation of instrument libraries.
> 
> 
> Personally  I will focus on 2) since it involves
> real time stuff, optimized data flow mechanisms, streaming etc.
> 
> I think swami could solve 1) and 3) as long as it is flexible in providing
> support for various sample formats.


My personal feeling is that the GUI itself could be done from scratch
according to the needs of 2)
The reason why i'm proposing this is, that a good sampler needs real
eye-candy too ;) and i would like to do something about it either by
doing some artwork in blender and gimp and/or by chasing some people on
deviantart.com or similar. But it's not just pure eye-candy, this adds a
whole lot of functionality as well, Halion and Mach5 being the best
examples. The overall design of the GUI is very important and plain QT
or GTK just isn't enough for it IMO. What i want/need here is to have a
nice rendered keyboard(which isn't that difficult since it's sufficient
to render just a few white and black pressed/released keys to build the
whole keyboard) a few types of knobs(which isn't difficult either except
for some moog knobs) and an efficient way to display waveforms of
samples and scroll them without artefacts(power of 2 should do). If you
look at Native Instruments Kontakt you can see that the GUI is very
simple in terms of eye-candy but very efficient as well.

I would also like to add some thoughts about linuxsamplers native
format, which linuxsampler should have IMO.
I was thinking of something like:
- XML data - descriptions and settings -- bzipped
- FLAC compressed sample data
- peakfiles(?)
- all packed up in tar
Notice that this would be the first time for a package to be bz2.tar and
not tar.bz2 :))
The only problem with FLAC(and other lossless compressions currently) is
that it doesn't handle floats yet. I'm not sure whether you guys
considered to use floats as well, probably yes. 

Marek