[Freepats] has `cheating' been considered?

[Roberto Gordo Saez]

On 8/7/06, Jonas Koelker <jonaskoelker at gnu.org> wrote:
> Whenever you have sound for a particular kind of instrument (say, an alto
> saxophone), reuse that sound for *all* types of that instrument (baritone,
> tenor, alto, soprano), and mark all the non-alto as "cheats" (think symlink).

I see no problem at all on using some duplicated instruments, or lower
quality samples, for typical desktop soundfonts. We have at least two
different targets for instrument samples:

- Very high quality instruments. If they are good enough, this kind of
samples can be used on studio to make professional music on GNU/Linux
systems using free samples. Currently studios are using non-free
samples, because lack of alternatives.

- Reduced quality samples for desktop usage, for playing midi files,
games or other applications. Most people may not mind to have lower
quality samples here, and size can be reduced a lot for this purposes.
For example, IMIS Piano is several GB of data, and it is only one
instrument (at 44Khz, far from the ideal 192Khz)... imagine whole
instrument set :-)

Current freepats instruments are more suitable to the second kind
(desktop), so I think it OK to do what you suggest. I'm personally
interested on the first kind of instruments, and that is the reason
for which I'm usually searching free high quality samples.

> I'm predicting that at least some of you are, shall we say, quite displeased
> at the thought of it, but hear me out.  My main argument is that slightly(*)
> wrong sound is better than no sound.

Maybe you are thinking of me? :-)

Ideally, if we found all needed high quality samples, we could make
high quality and low quality soundfonts from same sources. But another
possibility is to try to complete current freepats patches with lower
quality ones until we got the complete HQ sources, to have something
working until then.

I'm focused mainly on high quality samples, but if you can provide
some help with free samples that are OK for use with current freepats,
I think they will be very much appreciated here.

> The reason why I think wrong sound is better than no sound is that I can at
> least hear the `main' tone (think fourier analysis and overtones, which gives
> each instrument it's unique `sound').  Yes, the sound of the instrument is
> off, but midi is often not that great *compared to PCM audio*, so to me it's
> not that significant.

MIDI compared to PCM audio? Hmmm.. I think you are referring to MIDI
files on desktop PC. MIDI is commonly used professionally to produce
most PCM audio today. Except human voices (and maybe drums or
guitars), most modern music and soundtracks for films or spots are not
from real instruments, instead they are recorded from MIDI instruments
(usually expensive Yamaha, Korg, Roland...). I would want to have free
(as freedom) replacements for them. I'm still confident we can archive
it, but it is a very difficult goal that will take time, so finishing
first current patches for desktop usage may be a good idea.