List of sample libraries

The market is big, the differences among libraries, too. Discuss which libraries are your digital gold, and which ones are better left in stores.
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dahnielson
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List of sample libraries

Post by dahnielson » Fri Jan 25, 2008 10:44 pm

I think it might be useful to compile a list of sample libraries that LinuxSampler can load. In practice that means libraries in the Gigasampler/Gigastudio format and raw WAVE or AIFF samples to be assembled with Gigedit. Please let me know of additional libraries so that we can extend this list.

Commercial

Art Vista
Art Vista, run by Hans Adamson, has a Malmsjö Acoustic Grand and Cool Vibes library in Gigastudio format.

Bardstown Audio
Bardstown Audio have released a Bosendorfer Imperial Grand library in addition to libraries of acoustic bass, vintage jazz guitars, tenor banjos and classic accordions in Gigastudio format.

Big Fish Audio
Big Fish Audio offer various Gigastudio sample libraries like "First Call Horns" and "London Solo Strings".

BOLDER Sounds
BOLDER Sounds offer various Gigastudio sample libraries.

Creative Guild
Creative Guild have some sample libraries in Gigastudio format for sale.

Impact: Steel
This library was performed, recorded, designed, and produced by Wilbert Roget, II: I wanted to fill a gap I'd found in popular commercial sound libraries - several other products have metal hits and "found" percussion, but none are extensively sampled and usable as individual instruments. My goal therefore was to create a unique, detailed and playable library with the same amount of multisampled detail one would expect from a high end percussion bank. Available in Kontakt 2, Kontakt 1, Gigastudio 3 and Halion 3 formats.

Kirk Hunter Studios
Among L.A. violinist and sample developer Kirk Hunter's excellent orchestra libraries only his Emerald Orchestra is still available in Gigastudio format, the rest for Kontakt and EXS24 (the latter can successfully be translated into Gigastudio format).

Notre Dame de Budapest Pipe Organ Samples
Notre Dame de Budapest Pipe Organ Samples is an organ library created from the pipe organs of two Hungarian cathedrals: the Notre Dame de Buda (The Church of the Blessed Virgin, commonly known as Matthias-Church), which is the biggest organ in Hungary with a 99-stop Rieger-Kloss organ; and the Notre Dame de Kispest (Church of Our Lady, Kispest), which has a 38-stop Varga organ. The library is available in a Gigastudio 2 and a Gigastudio 3 version.

ProjectSAM
ProjectSAM, created by the dutch trio Maarten Spruijt, Vincent Beijer and Marco Deegenaars, is currently most renowned for their True Strike and True Strike 2 multi-format percussion libraries but has also developed a brass series and an organ library.

Realsamples
Realsamples offer you a variety of multisampled stringed instrument in multiformat at affordable prices. Especially take a look at the "Edition Beurmann" a series of instruments out of the renowned historical keyboard instrument collection of Professor Andreas E. Beurmann.

SampleTekk
SampleTekk, a Swedish sample developer run by Per “Worra” Larsson, is famous for their multi-format keyboard libraries and distribution of libraries as downloads.

SCARBEE
SCARBEE, run by danish bass player Thomas Hansen Skarbye, still has Classic Electric Piano, Scarbee Edgy Electric Piano, J-Slap and J-Fingered bass available in Gigastudio format.

SONiVOX
SONiVOX offer various libraries in Gigastudio 2 and Gigastudio 3 format.

Westgate Studios
Westgate Studios are currently developing and releasing their Modular Series of orchestral instruments in the Gigastudio 3 and Kontakt format. The series is organized by the various instrument families and let you buy them separately. Westgate offer smaller slimed down versions as downloads at lower price that can be upgraded to the full DVD version (the idea is that you can buy the download to play with while you wait for your DVD to arrive, the total cost is the same).

Vienna Symphonic Library
There are still some VSL libraries available in Gigastudio format from various sellers here and there (products with "VSL" in their name and not "VI"), despite being discontinued by VSL and replaced by the VI (Vienna Instrument) line.

Free and freebies

The Berklee College of Music Sampling Archive
Over 8.5GB of FREE Samples – Sound Effects, Loops, Grooves, Drums, Voices and Instruments – for The Children of the World. This huge and continuously expanding collection of new and original samples have been donated to Dr. Richard Boulanger @ cSounds.com specifically to support the OLPC developers, students and XO users. They are free and will be available under a CC-BY license for downloading and use in your music and activities. Each of the 6500+ samples is 16-bit, WAV, Mono, normalized to -3dB, and provided at 3 sample rates - 44.1K, 22.5K and 16K.

The Blanchet 1720
A virtual harpsichord copied after a 18th century French instrument by Blanchet. It has one manual, two 8' stops, plus a lute stop.

BOLDER Sounds
BOLDER Sounds has six free sample libraries with the kind of sound you won't find anywhere else.

Bovbjerg's Steinway Model C
Soeren Bovbjerg Steinway C. Gigastudio format, 33 MB uncompressed.

Creative Guild
Creative Guild have some free sample libraries in Gigastudio format (registration required).

FlameStudios Collection
Guitars, basses and a banjo. The FS Collections own thread on this forum can be found here.

G&S Custom Work Drum Kit Sample Library
One of the best sounding free drum kit. Not yet converted to Gigastudio but worth to mention now when the ns_kit7free is long gone.

Greg Sullivan's free electric pianos
Hohner Pianet T, Wurlitzer EP200 and Yamaha CP80.

G-Town Church Sampling Project
Recorded in his local church in Grebbestad, Sweden by music producer Tobias Marberger, this set of music samples should be invaluable to amateur and professional musicians alike. For this LegalTorrents version of the hard-to-find files, Tobias Marberger has officially Creative Commons-licensed the samples with a Sampling+ license. The multitude of samples include percussion of many different kinds (anvil, snare, wood sticks, hihat, brushplate, bongos), as well as piano, organ, mandolin, glockenspiel, flute, and many other high quality recordings.

HammerSound
A SoundFont library database containing SoundFonts submitted by people from all over the world. Of varying quality, but really handy starting point when you looking for a sample or instrument you're missing (e.g. use Translator Free to extract or convert the SoundFonts).

Mats Helgesson's Maestro Concert Grand v2
Mats Helgesson is the man who, in 2003, gave to the world the best free piano bank, the famous Maestro Concert Grand v2. The Maestro Concert Grand v2 is a big giga bank using 452 stereo samples of a concert piano, a Yamaha CF3, recorded with two Neumann KM84 microphones, disposed in X/Y, with 5 velocity layers. The archive weighs 354 MB, and, decompressed, this soundbank weighs 985 MB!

Naturalstudio
Naturalstudio have released several multi-sampled drum kits and the latest edition ns_kit7free is available in Gigastudio format. Apparently this drum kit and Naturalstudio is officially dead.

Orgue de Salon
A small house organ, 250 pipes, 5 real stops on two manuals (plus a coupled keyboard), built in 1988.

Philharmonia
Single note, phrases, articulations and percussion samples. Not in Gigastudio format but as mp3.

ProjectSAM
ProjectSAM usually have a set of Gigastudio freebies as demos.

Starbirth
Offer a free kudu shofar in Gigastudio format.

The Tic Tok Men
Sample sets come in two formats. As zip packages with each wav file separate or as a Gigasampler sample set: "Moogdrums One" and "RetroDrums One".

Total Harmonic Distortion
This is a tempo-based sample library of synthetic loops created and processed using a modular synthesizer. There are nearly 3GB of samples in 10 tempo groups (72bpm-144bpm) ranging from distorted, pulsing to ambient, soothing. A zip package of wav files.

University of Iowa: Musical Instrument Samples
The University of Iowa Musical Instrument Samples were created by Lawrence Fritts, Director of the Electronic Music Studios and Associate Professor of Composition at the University of Iowa in 1997. The instruments were recorded in the Anechoic Chamber in the Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Center at The University of Iowa. The only non-anechoic instrument is the piano, which was recorded in a small faculty teaching studio. All samples are in mono, 16 bit, 44.1 kHz, AIFF format. The exception is the piano, which is recorded in stereo.

Westgate Studios
Westgate Studios have some freebies on their site.

Worra's Place
Worra's place contain a collection of free samples in the Gigastudio format sorted into categories.
Last edited by dahnielson on Sat Aug 30, 2008 9:48 pm, edited 59 times in total.
Anders Dahnielson

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Re: List of sample libraries

Post by dahnielson » Fri Jan 25, 2008 10:59 pm

My question is: Are there any VSL libraries still available in the Gigastudio format?
Anders Dahnielson

Ardour2, Qtractor, Linuxsampler, M-AUDIO Delta 1010, Axiom 61, Korg D12, AKAI S2000, E-MU Proteus 2k, Roland R-5, Roland HP 1300e, Zoom RFX-1000, 4GB RAM x86_64 Intel Pentium Dual 1.80GHz Gentoo Linux

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Re: List of sample libraries

Post by cuse » Sat Jan 26, 2008 11:42 am


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Re: List of sample libraries

Post by dahnielson » Sat Jan 26, 2008 12:12 pm

Thanks!
Anders Dahnielson

Ardour2, Qtractor, Linuxsampler, M-AUDIO Delta 1010, Axiom 61, Korg D12, AKAI S2000, E-MU Proteus 2k, Roland R-5, Roland HP 1300e, Zoom RFX-1000, 4GB RAM x86_64 Intel Pentium Dual 1.80GHz Gentoo Linux

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Re: List of sample libraries

Post by dahnielson » Sat Feb 02, 2008 1:01 am

Just want to bump this topic because I just added G-Town Church Sampling Project to the list of free libraries. It was difficult to get hold of for a while when the original site was down but is now distributed as a torrent. If you don't have it already: Go get it now! You don't wanna miss it! (Danny Elfman used the "Stomp" patch on the soundtrack to Hulk.)
Anders Dahnielson

Ardour2, Qtractor, Linuxsampler, M-AUDIO Delta 1010, Axiom 61, Korg D12, AKAI S2000, E-MU Proteus 2k, Roland R-5, Roland HP 1300e, Zoom RFX-1000, 4GB RAM x86_64 Intel Pentium Dual 1.80GHz Gentoo Linux

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Re: List of sample libraries

Post by Alex » Sat Feb 09, 2008 11:16 pm

Anders, i've got the Gtown, and had it for some time.

A great suggestion. This is a good, consistent, reliable library, that works, and sounds good. After the first demo, which i'm working on at the moment, i'm going to revisit gtown, and see what i can cook up.

If anyone wants a good, free, library that sounds like a commercial offering, this is definitely on the list.

Alex.


:)

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Re: List of sample libraries

Post by dahnielson » Sat Feb 09, 2008 11:51 pm

I'm going to contribute a first demo soon using the Gtown full-stops organ. Just need to freshen up my memory, was a couple of years since I last played the piece except for the first couple of bars (guess which piece :D ).
Anders Dahnielson

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Re: List of sample libraries

Post by arus » Tue Feb 12, 2008 2:23 pm

Hi.

An addition to free giga banks section: Mats Helgesson's Maestro Concert Grand v2.

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Re: List of sample libraries

Post by dahnielson » Tue Feb 12, 2008 3:23 pm

arus wrote:An addition to free giga banks section: Mats Helgesson's Maestro Concert Grand v2.
I say, jolly good first post mate! :o
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Re: List of sample libraries

Post by sbenno » Tue Feb 12, 2008 4:00 pm

aurus, thanks for the link!
how does this piano sound ? Is it currently the best sounding large free piano sample ?

I have seen that on that webpage there are other samples too like harpsichord, organ etc,
but not in GIG format (kontakt,sf2). Could someone ask the authors and ask if we can turn it into GIG files ?
It is nice see that finally more higher quality free samples are being released.

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