[Freepats] Re: future .sf2s weigths

[Mark Constable]

On Friday 28 April 2006 21:39, Roberto Gordo Saez wrote:
> My main computer is a PII at 400Mhz, with 224 MB RAM. I have problems
> using soundfonts bigger than 4 MB :-)
> But it is completely passive cooled with no fans at all, the main
> reason for which I have not changed it.

Were you going to download all those samples and convert them
on your PII, then upload them again to somewhere public ?

> Yes, I think most GNU/Linux distributions would not want to include an
> almost 2GB piano soundfont... just imagine the size of the whole
> general midi soundfont ;-)

Sure but eventually a huge set of samples could be distributed
on a dedicated DVD and also available from archive.org, perhaps
via Bittorrent from opensrc.org, and other sites, as well.

At the rate we are going we won't have to worry about that for
another 10 years and we'll all have 100Mbit wireless broadband
and 10Ghtz optical computers the size of a matchbox!

> Anyways, it is always good to have an archive with the full material,
> maybe future consumer computers will be able to use them in full.

There needs to be one that can end up being a lightweight deb
or rpm and downloadable in an hour via 56k modem... so that
means around 20Mb would be ideal. That's the main one that
needs to be aimed for. There obviously could be any number of
larger soundfonts and GM/GS set available from the net... and
I suspect someone would, once the instruments are available at
all, produce micro and nano versions for PDAs and such things.

The approx 20Mb Debian compatible (they're the ones to please
as far as a license goes, whatever license it ends up being)
GM/GS soundfont set is the one to go for first.

--markc