[Freepats] Re: New Hydrogen Drumkit and free sound samples

[Mark Constable]

On Sunday 09 April 2006 20:17, Roberto Gordo Saez wrote:
> On 4/8/06, Marcos Guglielmetti Gmail <marcospcmusica at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Download from:
> > ftp://ftp.musix.ourproject.org/pub/musix/sound-samples/Colombo-Acustic-Drumkit/

Now mirrored here...

 http://freepats.opensrc.org/musix/samples/drums/

BTW Colombo-Acustic-Drumkit should probably be Colombo-Acoustic-Drumkit

> > Last time notes: this multilayered Hydrogen's Drumkit only uses some of
> > these .flac samples, I will move the unused samples to another path
> > later...
> 
> Great work Marcos. Thank you!

Yes, it's the best sounding Hydrogen drumkit I've heard.

> Although free software is now used in many different areas,
> sound/music production is one of this areas that is getting less
> attention. It is rare to find people using free software in a
> professional way for this tasks, and the lack of quality samples is
> the most prominent cause.

Also, when it comes time to redistribute an entire project,
which is an unique potential in the FLOSS world, we simply
can't because an important part of an entire  project is
going to be, most likely, "stolen" sounds from somewhere.

The main reason that I am personally interested in this issue
of a decent soundfont is because when and if I ever write and
produce any music I would like to do so under a full GPL license,
but that really demands that I provide the source of my project
which I am happy to do... everything, including the MIDI tracks,
wav solo parts, sequencer and ardour parts... everything, BUT
at this point in time I would not be able to provide any MIDI
instruments (most likely in sf2 format) because I would have
to resort to proprietary samples to get decent sounding
instruments (mainly bass and drumkit... and then mainly the
kick drum).

> Many samples are still missing from freepats and many others need to
> be improved.

I'd say it's more a matter of aiming for a complete new set
of instrument samples and only use the current freepats
temporarily to make up any missing or hard to get sounds
until new samples can be found.

Maybe I am dreaming but I would like to think it should be
looked at from this point of view.

> Mark, since you have a better knowledge on what is 
> missing to produce a minimal (but usable) set of high quality
> instrument samples, can you please make a list of priority samples
> that are needed?

There is a fairly complete list of missing instruments here...

 http://freepats.opensrc.org/freepats/README

> Also, a list of samples already included in freepats 
> that you think can be reused and are acceptable quality would be a
> good idea. This way, focus can be given on most needed ones, in orther
> to have something usable as soon as possible.

Quite a few years ago I started pulling out the raw samples
from the guspats and was horrified to find some were 32khtz
and I think even 22.5khtz... and often quite noisy when
listened to in a loop. It was a lot of effort and I can't
even find the utility I used to break out the wav components
of the guspats. If they were converted to a sf2 soundfont then
perhaps Smurf or Swami could be used to review all the samples.

Sorry, I can't comment on which ones are best to reuse other
than to say "only temporarily until better samples are available"
for any or all of them.

--markc