[Freepats] Open Source soundfonts

[ml at distasis.com]

I'm trying to record some public domain music.  I can sing, but can't play 
an instrument well.  So, I was hoping to use abc2midi and Timidity to create 
the accompaniment.  Was very surprised when I searched the Internet for Open 
Source or public domain soundfonts and couldn't find very much at all.  
After some searching, I did finally run across the Freepats site.  It sounds 
like a great project. 

I've been wanting to get some recordings of my chimes and wanting a good 
music box sound.  Maybe I can record one of my music boxes and the 
pentatonic chimes to wave and add them to the collection.  Would love to 
find a way to get them into sf2 format, although wave using Audacity to mix 
it into a song would probably work too.  I have a M-Audio 2496 card, a mixer 
and an Oktava MK319 condenser mic.  Still haven't figured out how to get 
good recordings out of the system yet, but I'm working on it.  Suggestions 
on improving recording appreciated. 

Have you contacted some of the other similar Open Source or Creative Commons 
projects out there and checked whether you can combine resources?  There are 
several sound sample sites that are sharing sounds under the Creative 
Commons license.   I also remember an article on one of their mailing lists 
a while back that they were working on making sure there's some 
compatibility between Creative Commons and other Open Source style licenses. 

Don't know if they're any good, but I did run into some sf2 files marked as 
public domain or free for use.  They included the following: 

Free for use Kawai piano with some documentation in zip file
http://www.synthesize.de/downloads/soundsfonts/awerockas/KAWAI.zip 

Public domain files on sf2midi:
http://www.sf2midi.com/index.php?searchword=public+domain&filetype=sf2&types 
earch=files&page=search&submitButtonName=Go%21+%3E%3E 

KiKaZ DrUmZ.sfpack from pd samples
http://www.soundfonts.it/?a=soundfonts&c=17 

japanese muramatsu flute it was based public domain samples for k-2000
There are some other files at hammersound that say they're based on pd 
samples too.
http://www.hammersound.net/cgi-bin/soundlink.pl?action=view_category&categor 
y=Pipe&ListStart=0&ListLength=15 

Winsite has three sample soundfont zip files that say they're freeware with 
no use limitations:
http://www.winsite.com/bin/Info?500000003957
http://www.winsite.com/bin/Info?447
http://www.winsite.com/bin/Info?500000004533 

This looked like an interesting project with some of the files marked public 
domain.
Unfortunately, they're compressed in cram and I was unable to find a Win32 
copy to uncompress with.  I tried downloading the source and compiling with 
mingw and msys, but it's so dependent on other libraries, I just ended up 
with errors.  I did eventually turn up a Windows exe of Swami at 
https://sourceforge.jp/projects/twsynth/files/?release_id=3D16389#16389
but no cram exe included.
http://sounds.resonance.org/patches.py 

Good luck with the project. 

Best wishes.
Laura
http://www.distasis.com/recipes/music.htm