[freepats] Freepats 2.0

[John Lewis]

It looks like Freepats 2.0 has rolled out and there is just enough
things documented that  can actually do something to help. The new
website is out and there was a large document dump on github in September.

Looking at http://www.onicos.com/staff/iz/formats/guspat.html, I didn't
know where to start because I couldn't make heads or tales on what that
means. With
https://github.com/freepats/documentation/wiki/How-to-contribute I can
actually go about getting audio samples and creating a sound bank.

Some of my favorite tools are listed under
https://github.com/freepats/documentation/wiki/Free-software-programs. I
just recommended MilkyTracker and Audacity to a potential musician
earlier this week who was complaining about how all of the music making
tools were unfordable.

There are two big things I don't understand. What exactly do you need to
record from an instrument to make a complete sound bank? What is the
difference between a wav file http://soundfile.sapp.org/doc/WaveFormat/
and a pat file? I some of the metadata is different and I don't know
where the audo goes in pat files. I can make a better guess after
looking at the wav file format. I think it goes in "(s)bytes Sample
data" and "(s)bytes" means unlimited size. Either way I think I need to
redo the GUS Patch format doc needs to be redrafted with some
modifications to make it easier to read.

I already downloaded  guspatch-tools-0.1 so I can figure out how,  to
build it, how it works, and how to package it for a GNU/Linux distro. I
have 4 sound banks I potentially want to create right now. One based on
the beep command, one based on a friend's Tesla coil (I don't know how I
am going to do that with the electronic interference) and two based on
voice clips of podcasters.