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Gey: Open Source Instruments: I give upGey: Open Source Instruments: I give upPosted Aug 17, 2012 1:37 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)Parent article: Gey: Open Source Instruments: I give up
I applaud him for actually thinking about this, it is rare that people care about the preferred form for modification of anything other than programs running on the CPU. Even for programs running on secondary processors (aka firmware) or programs running on other peoples CPUs (JavaScript), I see folks either ignoring the problem, not building from source or complaining after their package was rejected from Debian.
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Gey: Open Source Instruments: I give up Posted Aug 17, 2012 2:13 UTC (Fri) by PaulWay (✭ supporter ✭, #45600) [Link]
It's a problem that has haunted the LMMS sample base for a while - no-one now knows where those samples came from, nor what license they were released under, and no-one (sadly) seems to be bothered to remove them and replace them with known-license versions.
This said, I don't know why Nils is struggling. There's FreeSound - http://www.freesound.org/ - which has mammoth quantities of samples of everything from real drumkits and instruments to environmental effects and found noises (and I'm only including 'real' instruments and samples here - there's a lot of synthesised samples there too). There's the OLPC Free Sound Samples library - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Free_sound_samples - which includes lots of libraries of professionally-recorded, full quality instrument samples. All of those are available under remix- and rework-friendly Creative Commons licenses.
High-quality free instrument synthesisers are a bit harder to find. But you can't go past ZynAddSubFX, which is also built into LMMS, for a huge variety of synthesized natural and artificial instrument patches.
If he's looking for SoundFont (.sf2) files, then I think that's a more difficult ask. But to me that's like saying there are no Creative Commons-licensed 78RPM records: it's ignoring the forest for the trees.
Hope this helps,
Paul
Gey: Open Source Instruments: I give up Posted Aug 17, 2012 5:00 UTC (Fri) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]
A tangent but, IIRC FreeSound's samples are all CC-BY-NC and "Sampling+" licensed, which are— respectively— far more restrictive, and comparatively restrictive to typical _commercial_ instrument and sample libraries, at least in terms of the use of the works beyond just getting a copy of them. Of course, the premiere disk streaming sampler for Linux (Linux Sampler) is itself not free software.
There are, of course, a lot of freely licensed samples out there— but thats not the same as having consistently recorded and cataloged samples which are logically assembled into neatly curated packages. For SFX the lack of consistency it's terrible but for everything else it's fairly significant.
Gey: Open Source Instruments: I give up Posted Aug 17, 2012 16:49 UTC (Fri) by rgareus (guest, #56870) [Link]
Synths e.g. zynaddsubfx, joshimi, amsynth etc are not the problem. Neither are physically modeled instruments (aeolus, bristol, fooYC20,..) or synth-plugins in general. Linux Audio has come a long way regarding professional audio workflow.
The problem really is the lack of high-quality samples-libs.
There are certainly some free GM voices and a couple of excellent free sf, sfz or gig sample libs.. but they are mostly for keyed instruments or drums and come with only one timbre. - Freesound is very nice, certainly. But in its mammoth quantities there's a huge lack of quality.
Alas, none of the available free/libre sample-libraries out there come even close to what is needed to do a proper film-score or a good soundtrack.
Ask the Blender foundation why they don't use free-software to make the soundtrack for their free movies.. It's not the lack of free software, but the lack of samples.
Gey: Open Source Instruments: I give up Posted Aug 17, 2012 10:19 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Mmm. I think your comparison to programming is potentially instructive here.
There has to be a line drawn somewhere about both _preferred form_ and _source_ code.
I think software happened to make it relatively easy to draw that line, and music maybe not so much. If I'm remixing your album, I probably do not have the ability (regardless of whether this is a Free Music project or a major recording artist) to go back to the session musician who recorded that flute solo and request they play it slightly differently. In some sense the PCM recording of their existing attempts at that solo have become the preferred form, and to go back and re-record is a separate endeavour not a mere modification of the "source" of the existing music.
Gey: Open Source Instruments: I give up Posted Aug 19, 2012 11:23 UTC (Sun) by guus (subscriber, #41608) [Link]
You do have the ability to play the flute solo yourself, or have someone else play it for you, given the sheet music. The GPL for example doesn't require that you can reproduce a binary bit for bit, only that you can compile the sources and get something that is functionally identical. So personally I would draw the line differently :)
By the way, I am working on music written in ABC notation and using a CSound orchestra file, so that the resulting OGG files can be recompiled from source files that are in human readable files that can be edited in any text editor.
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