Gey: Open Source Instruments: I give up [LWN.net]

Gey: Open Source Instruments: I give up

Posted Aug 17, 2012 2:13 UTC (Fri) by PaulWay (✭ supporter ✭, #45600)
In reply to: Gey: Open Source Instruments: I give up by pabs
Parent article: Gey: Open Source Instruments: I give up

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

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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.