[LAU] Linuxsampler/qsampler usability and session portability

I addressed the list yesterday regarding my dissatisfaction wrt the current
state of soft samplers under Linux. Since then I have checked out the latest
svn versions of Linuxsampler and qsampler just to make sure nothing had
dramatically changed since I last tried them. I'd much rather we fix up LS
and qsampler to be usable in all cases rather than anyone, such as myself,
go starting a whole new project. I was thinking about posting this to the LS
mailing list (if there is one) but the problems I've encountered today
involves a wider range of Linux audio projects than just LS (such as LV2 and
Ardour) so I thought it best to discuss these issues here.

I have two goals I'd like to see achieved:

1 - You should be able to import wavs into qsampler and create/use simple
.sfz files without opening/editing/manually creating any text (.sfz) files.
This should be easily achieved by adding a new menu option to qsampler
called something like 'Import audio files' or 'Create sfz'. In most cases
you just need to specify the soundfile and the note or range that will
trigger it. Comments Rui?

2 - It should be simple to copy/move an Ardour or qtractor session that uses
the LS LV2 plugin and sf2/sfz/gig files from one machine to another

I certainly know 1 is still a problem but should be easily rectified but
I've not been able to test 2 properly yet as qsampler or LS doesn't seem to
be working? Did I format my sfz file correctly? I'm not sure which is
 exactly why I want to see point 1 implemented.

For 2 to work then I think it'd be ideal if the sampler data files got
stored within the session dir, in the case of Ardour at least, if we can.
When creating a sfz file you need to specify the path to the wav files used
and so I would imagine that Ardour and/or the LS LV2 plugin would need to be
modified to search within a specific sub-dir with the session folder to look
for any such files. If such files are missing then the plugin should notify
the user and ask for an alternate path to search for the files in. Maybe it
does the latter already?

I was pleasantly surprised when testing the HighLife lxvst with Ardour 3 to
discover that it stored all its sample data within the ardour project file
itself but unfortunately it has to be converted into plain text hence
samples end up consuming about 4x the amount of space used by an
uncompressed wav file so its not totally ideal but at least it makes
sessions easily portable, which is very important to group work and
collaborations.

Dan

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Received on Fri Oct 14 16:15:01 2011