SoundFont/DLS2/Gig (was Re: [Linuxsampler-devel] testing of linuxsampler and cvs activity)

[Josh G. <jg...@us...>]

On Tue, 2003-10-28 at 05:48, Robert Jonsson wrote:
> Tuesday 28 October 2003 14.22 skrev be...@ga...:
> >
> > > - soundfont support, for now I'm perfectly happy with gig support, I
> > > wonder how hard it would be to add soundfont support though..?
> >
> > Well soundfont offers quite some modulation possibilities
> > (Peter Hanappe and Josh Green know this better than anyone).
> > I guess for now if you want SF2 it is better to use fluidsynth.
> > SF2 is IMHO a bit limited and linuxsampler aims at the professional
> > sampling domain so our priority is to make .GIG working. (at a later stage
> > we will try to add 24bit sample in Halion / Kontakt formats too).
> 
> yeah, soundfonts may not have the same professional feel, there are lots of 
> tome though, and some of the new ones allocate quite a lot of memory.
> >
> > Or alternatively when our GIG engine will be complete you can try to
> > convert your SF2 files using a conversion program like cdxtract
> > http://www.cdxtract.com (but relatively expensive $150).
> > Or better, integrate the fluid engine to linuxsampler :-)
> 
> yeah, I was thinking along those lines :) but I have no idea if it would be 
> feasible. 
> Josh are you here somewhere? Enlighten me :)
> 

Yep, I'm here :) When comparing GigaSampler versus SoundFont versus
DLS2, I don't think there is anything in particular that would make
GigaSampler more professional than these other formats, except for a few
key points: streaming of samples and > 16 bit audio. There is no reason
why streaming of samples couldn't be implemented with these other
formats, though. In the case of DLS2, its a really flexible format
(heck, GigaSampler used it, or rather trashed it in my opinion, would
have been nice if they had some sort of signature in the header). I
think DLS2/SF2 has more flexibility in some areas than GigaSampler
(particularly in the area of modulation, and extent of control values,
GigaSampler has rather restricted parameter ranges, at least from what I
have seen). DLS2 could theoretically contain any audio format that WAV
files can store, since the audio is stored as embedded WAV files. Its
just that the spec says that only 8bit or 16bit audio is defined as
being part of the standard.

Thinking of converting SoundFont or DLS2 files to GigaSampler gives me
the creeps. Doing it for your own purposes might make sense, but
distributing those GigaSampler files, means that less people can now use
that instrument patch, since its not an open standard. Maybe this will
change in the future, but I haven't quite come to like the GigaSampler
format yet. Maybe I just haven't worked with it enough. It would be nice
to see LinuxSampler built in a way that makes it modular enough to use
other formats easily.

I still envision my own project libInstPatch being usable for supporting
other formats for GigaSampler. It supports DLS2 and SF2 at this point
and GigaSampler to some extent and has a Python binding which I just
added. I've been working a lot lately though, so I haven't had a lot of
time to put toward these projects. But I hope that changes in the near
future. It would be nice to collaborate more on some of this stuff. The
C/C++ issue is probably going to come up again I'm sure, I'll look into
how hard it would be to add a C++ wrapper to libInstPatch, if that would
make it more appealing.

Nice to see some activity on this list. Cheers.
	Josh Green