Re: [Rosegarden-user] Re: Rosegarden in SoS

[Chris C. <ca...@al...>]

Daniel James wrote:
> Are there any GPL soundfonts?

That's a very sound (arf) question.  I suspect many of the
"free" soundfonts you find are of highly dubious legal status
and are probably assembled largely by cut-and-paste from
commercial fonts, or by sampling commercial hardware (an
action I'm very unclear about the copyright status of, but
it's probably dodgy).  The rest are probably divided between
very labour-intensive, very individual creations and rather
academic recordings of particular instruments.

> I downloaded the freeware Vintage 
> Dreams Waves v 2.0 - only a 251kB zip file.

Vintage Dreams is a very nice one, but it's not very general-
purpose because it's explicitly supposed to emulate a
selection of old-skool synths... isn't it?  Soundfonts that
include reasonable samples of real instruments tend to be
larger, for a start.

There may be people out there who would be prepared to GPL
some existing soundfonts, if you asked them nicely.  They
might not be general-purpose GM real-instrument ones though.
There's probably nothing to lose from asking the creator of
Vintage Dreams, who I think runs a commercial soundfont
operation that might benefit from additional exposure and
publicity, whether he'd consider GPLing the already-free
Vintage Dreams font; similarly there are some high quality
if very specialised generator-based tiny soundfonts by Bree
Gorton available from www.hammersound.net and elsewhere that
*are already free *to all intents and purposes and that it
might possibly be possible to get GPLd.  Really if you had
the time to approach the creators of a number of these fonts
(choose those people who actually include READMEs in their
font packages and have websites) and ask if they would be
prepared to place them under the GPL, you could be doing us
all a big favour (heavy hint, heavy hint)...


Chris