[freepats] Freepats 2.0

[ml at distasis.com]

On Dec 8, John wrote:
> 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.

Glad you found some of your favorite tools listed.  I tried to add all the
music programs I've worked with or built from source code.  If you have
other suggestions that are not listed, let us know.

>
> 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 added a link to Wotsit's at the FreePats site.  The official Wotsit's
site is down, but the information is still available at archive.org (which
is where the link points).  You can get details on various sound file
formats there.  A wave file is one of the more basic formats.  It mainly
contains the data to generate/recreate a recorded sound wave.  (Formats
like midi just contain note information and instrument names.)  Formats
like sf2, sfz and even some mod files contain the data to generate a sound
wave (similar to a wave file) plus other information.  Formats like flac,
mp3, ogg have compressed versions of the wave file information so the file
sizes are much smaller.  However, some of these formats are lossy, so you
may lose quality.  flac is lossless.

Roberto wrote:
> I've made a python utility that takes an extended SFZ text definition
> plus a set of wav files and automatically builds SF2 sound banks from them
> (possibly in different sizes/qualities). Most sound banks in the
> new freepats web site are made this way, and it is a huge time saver. If we
> manage to extend it with PAT knowledge, the same utility could be used to
> automatically build all formats from the same wav files, which would be
> fantastic. I will upload the sources as soon as I have a little free time.

That sounds useful.  Hope the source is up at the FreePats site soon.  I'm
seeing more and more SFZ soundfonts files.  However, the programs I use
still only work with SF2 format.

Sincerely,
Laura
http://www.distasis.com/recipes/music.htm