SFZ

This forum section was originally created while we were discussing a new, additional engine and sampler format designed from scratch. In the meantime this resulted in our new SFZ2 engine, which is already implemented to a large extent. However this is still the right place for ideas, feature requests, drafts and plans for new engine / format concepts and ideas. We now have 3 sampler engines (Gig, SFZ2, SoundFont 2). Why not having more?
Alex
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Re: SFZ

Post by Alex » Thu Jul 28, 2011 6:16 pm

Octron wrote:Hi,
is it possible to use multichannel Wav or OGG Files instead of simple Stereo or MONO Files in SFZ??

It would be a great benefit because I am planning to build a Drum library.
Therein I decide to play not only the direct microphoned source but also the overheads. For example Snaredrum direct signal from upper membrane and second direct signal from lower membrane and finally the overhead signal.

If I could do so, I am able to build a real sounding drum set with crosstalks.

By the way, is there a short delay when playing two sounds via the same midi channel?
Or are the two sounds played back sample-synchron??

If not, I could build several librarys, each for each drum instrument, stack them in Linuxsampler and connect them all to the same midichannel.
If the samples were played back really simultaneously it would be possible to trigger a real drumset with 10 microphone positions playing all together.

Best Wishes!
I've read this a couple of times, and been thinking about how you would achieve this in the current framework.

There's no reason that i can think of that would stop you building an sfz with the same key for more than one sample. So each time you played that key, it would trigger more than one sample at the same time. And if you wanted a delay for say 1 sample to emulate a distance recording, i.e. overheads that are a few ms later than the near samples, then you could add that sample to a region of it's own, add a delay opcode, but keep the same key as the other samples.

SFZ is a powerful protocol, and with some tweaking of levels, delay in ms, etc, you may come up with a decent result for relatively little pain actually using the SFZ, rather than looking for multi-channel solutions. A drum kit could be a single SFZ, from a single channel, with the various instruments in the set given specific keys (even if multi samples are playing at once) in a CC range. ( bass drum = middle C = CC60 = c3, snare drum = D3 =CC 62, for example)


If you're using jackmidi as your midi ports device, with any external sequencer that will give you jackmidi ports ported directly to Linuxsampler, then it will be sample accurate, as all jack data, be it audio or midi, is timestamped.

Good luck,

Alex.

JeanK
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Re: SFZ

Post by JeanK » Sun Sep 04, 2011 2:43 pm

Hi folks

I have a problem with LinuxSampler. I have not managed to get sfz-engine available in LS of my studio computer (ASUS P5Q motherboard, 4G RAM, M-Audio 1010LT audio card). I have installed LS in it by using these mostly new subversion packages from Ubuntu's repository and Tango Studio's ppa:

libgig6 3.3.0+svn2206-0tstudio1
liblinuxsampler3 1.0.0+svn2207-0tstudio1
liblscp6 0.5.6+svn2183-0ub
gigtools 3.3.0+svn2206-0tstudio
linuxsampler 1.0.0+svn2207-0tstudio1
qsampler 0.2.2+svn514-0tstudio1

On top of that there is also Fantasia 0.9.

These new packages should support sfz, but when I open Qsampler, only gig-engine is mentioned to be registered. After that it is of course the only engine Fantasia knows. With gig-samples everything is OK.

I find it mysterious, that in two other computers (desktop machine and Fujitsu-Siemens laptop), after an identical installation of LS and using the same kernel (2.6.31-rt), all the supported engines, gig, sfz and sf2, became available. In these two non-studio computers I use regular Ubuntu 10.04, while in the studio I have Ubuntu 10.04 minimal installation with Lubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Studio audio-plugins and selected jack-based audio apps.

I have made the installation several times (after thorough uninstallation of all the packages) and tried with different frames/period settings in Jackctl setup. Is there something that I have missed? Or does my minimal operating system base lack something? So far it has been very swift and solid.

I'm grateful if someone could help me.

JK

varpa
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Re: SFZ

Post by varpa » Mon Sep 05, 2011 2:22 am

You need to compile the SVN version of QSampler to get SFZ support.

JeanK
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Re: SFZ

Post by JeanK » Mon Sep 05, 2011 8:13 am

Hi varpa!

As I wrote, the packages that I used for installation are compiled by Tango Studio team using LS subversion (svn) repository.

I'm sorry if my English is difficult to understand. I repeat and try to explain my situation clearly. – I have made an identical installation of LS in three computers. In two of them I have support for gig, sfz and sf2, but in the third (alas, the one that I use in my studio) there is only support for gig. Sfz support in two computers confirms that Tango Studio's svn-packages really give support for sfz. IMO it means that something else is wrong or lacking, not the fact that I have not compiled from svn myself.

JK

JeanK
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Re: SFZ

Post by JeanK » Sat Sep 10, 2011 9:39 am

Varpa suggested (on another site) that I could check if there are older libraries and files that cause conflict. There really was libraries both in /usr/lib and /usr/local/lib. But I had to remove LS totally and all linuxsampler, liblinuxsampler, libgig and lblscp directories and files, too. When I installed LS again, all three engines were available.

JK

kenz
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Re: SFZ

Post by kenz » Fri Jan 17, 2014 3:54 pm

Hello guys I'm new on forum but Linuxsampler is my preferred sampler right now for old gig playback and I see you guys are moving towards sfz, which IMO is a good move. I'm just wondering if you guys support compressed (lossless) file formats for the samples themselves and not just wav? FLAC of wavpack for example, both open source, should be easy to add to I assume? If I end up converting my giga samples I really would love some compression to save space & bandwidth for the samples (CPU usage isn't my main culprit but disk bandwidth or long load times...).

On a side note, sf2 soundfonts can also be compressed with sfark (losslessly) which turned open source last year at least the decompressor did, although I'm not sure how feasible disk streaming/realtime playback would be with it, but just giving a headsup if you're interested in any way about it. https://github.com/raboof/sfarkxtc

varpa
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Re: SFZ

Post by varpa » Fri Jan 17, 2014 6:52 pm

The sample formats (for SFZ) supported by linuxsampler are wav, ogg, and flac (since early 2013). I always convert SFZ with wave samples to flac which reduces size by 50-70% and results in faster loading of samples. Even though you might think flac would require additional CPU to decode it seems the additional CPU required is negligible, i.e. I cannot see any downside to using flac over wav samples.

kenz
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Re: SFZ

Post by kenz » Sat Jan 18, 2014 9:14 pm

That sounds great, I will give it a try soon with FLAC files then, thanks for confirming :)

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