[Freepats] Open Source soundfonts

[Roberto Gordo Saez]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2007 at 09:59:53PM +0000, ml at distasis.com wrote:
> 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. 

Hello, and welcome here!

Your worries are true, there are very few completely free soundfonts.
While there are many sites with provide "free soundfont downloads", they
are usually not really free. I've contacted with several of them, and
they usually reply that their soundfonts are free only for non-commercial,
or royalty-free but with redistribution or modification disallowed.

And those are not the worse cases, because the most common response when
asking to the author is: "I've downloaded the samples from the net, and
since I couldn't find a license, I've supposed they are on the public
domain". That is a very risky assumtion that is usually not true. The
result is that most soundfonts marked as "public domain" actually
contain proprietary (usually ripped) samples.

> 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. 

Please, do it! Your contributions would be very much appreciated here.
If you record them to wave, someone could make an sf2 from them.

> 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. 

There are several Creative Commons licenses. For example, The Freesound
Project (http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/) uses CC Sampling Plus 1.0, which
is not suitable for our purposes because it does forbid the use of the
samples within some commercial activities.

On the other side, CC Attribution 3.0 license is a good license for
free samples, I think.

So finding good, original and free samples is a hard task. Usually we
need to contact with the author for clarification. Because of previous
responses, I'm now very picky with those apparently free soundfonts.
But it is quite rewarding when someone reports a good one. I will look
at the links you provided, and please, keep posting your links anytime
you find something you think it may be suitable.