Re: [LAU] Yamaha Disklavier Pro grand piano

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 08:29:44AM -0600, Stephen Doonan wrote:
> Yes, I believe that the Coakley samples were recorded in stereo. One of
> the things that impresses me is that although William Coakley is an
> engineer, he is also a musician (he plays piano himself).

Well, I must say that I'm not a sound engineer, and I have very limited
knowledge of soundfonts. The sad truth is that it is very unlikely that
they will ever reach the quality of Coakley's ones. So why I'm
strugling to make those soundfonts? Because nobody else does!

This is a known problem that has been discussed several times in the
freepats lists. There are very few people willing to give their time
to create free soundfonts (Marcos Guglielmetti, main developer of the
Musix GNU/Linux distribution, is one of the very few exceptions).

Few people realise that most "free" soundfonts out there contain
unlicensed samples. It is easy to recognize copyrighted samples in
those soundfonts from manufacturers like Emu, Korg, Roland, Yamaha...
There are lots of sites in the Internet with "royalty free", or "public
domain" samples, but actually those samples are ripped from some
unknown (most likely copyrighted) source.

Just exactly like free software, free samples need to be unambiguously
placed under a free license by *its author*. And of course the author
*must* be identified. Thinking that they are free because the author
is unkown is just too much optimistic. They must be recorded from
original, analog instruments, or synthesized from scratch by the
author. The samples contained in hardware synths/keyboards are subject
to copyright in the same way that proprietary soundfonts, so they can't
be used on a free soundfont.

There are very, very few free samples out there. Note that the license
used in sites such as freesound.org is not free in the freedom
definition used by the FSF, since it does forbid some kinds of
commercial usage.

So my first and most important goal is to create a collection of free
samples for several instruments. Next, it is required to create
soundfonts from those samples. With my "demo" soundfonts I just hope
to get the attention of some people. We manage to get high quality,
free software operating systems, thanks to the collaboration of many
people, so I still hope that people start to join to the freepats
project, stop using their pirated, "semi-free" or proprietary
soundfonts and begin to think about actually working on creating
really free, high quality soundfonts.

I must say that I'm not interested in dedicating such amount of time
required to reach the quality of Coakley's soundfonts. I will fix most
things, and try to improve the balance, but I'm currently not
interested in building a small soundfont that sounds as good as the
big one, is not my priority. Instead, is very likely that the next
version will have two additional layers (and thus will be bigger,
sorry).

> This brief article of his about his observations and approach is very
> interesting:
>
> Why Bigger Isn't Better -- by William Coakley
>
> http://williamcoakley.com/articles.php?article=bigger.php

This is a quote from the article:

"[...] it takes LESS time and LESS work to develop a 3 gigabyte piano
than it does a beautiful thirty two megabyte piano[...]"

It's true. If only two layers are used, a lot of work is needed to
create fake layers in the middle. It is needed to carefully filter
higher harmonics and blend the result. It could easily take months of
work.

But I don't agree with some of the statments given in the article.
It is certainly possible to create fake intermediate layers that sound
as good as the real ones, but claiming that they can sound *better*
than the real notes recorded from the piano is no more than a beatiful
way to advertise his soundfonts.

As Coakley says, it is just easier and faster to do the same with
more samples, and that's the real reason. If the samples are well
balanced in both big and small soundfonts, the bigger soundfont will
sound at least as good as the smallest one, and probably better
(it will use much more RAM, though).

Producing a good soundfont with less layers and half the size would
be desirable, but unfortunatelly I'm unable to do that myself alone.
If someone is willing to donate his time to work in this area,
please let me know, it would be great.
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Received on Tue Sep 16 04:15:02 2008