[freepats] Freepats 2.0

[Roberto]

Hey, thank you for your emails, it's good to know that there is interest
in reboot of freepats.

Freepats 2.0 is already on the works even if it was not announced here
(sorry for that). Expect lots of new instruments and better quality,
thanks to the help of musicians and instrument owners, and working in a
physical workgroup at the Medialab-prado center in Madrid:
http://medialab-prado.es/

Working in a physical workgroup is faster and pleasant, but making web
and communication channels should be high priority to enable
participation of people from any part of the world. If any of you are
wiling to maintain an IRC channel, wiki, social network channels or
other resources, please drop an email here with your ideas, community
resources need help. Documentation also needs help.

It would be great if you are wiling to create a local working group
around your place.

Note that we are starting almost from scratch. There are many unknown or
dubious samples in the old freepats archive, unfortunately. Only
original, correctly identified, completely unencumbered and free samples
will be preserved, everything else will be deleted and replaced. If you
absolutely sure that want to keep something from the old freepats
archive please download a copy since it won't be preserved (it will dead
for good).

Having different sets of soundbanks, small for low resource usage and
large for high quality, is definitely a good idea.

Maintaining the archive on git platform would be great too (and would
help to reduce hosting costs and bandwidth, wich is huge currently), but
it proved cumbersome to use in our tests as it becomes extremely
inefficient for large binary files. It is a known issue of git, there
are some extensions used by Github and GitLab that may fix the problem,
if someone is willing to test them it would be very useful to know the
results:

https://github.com/blog/1986-announcing-git-large-file-storage-lfs
https://about.gitlab.com/2015/02/17/gitlab-annex-solves-the-problem-of-versioning-large-binaries-with-git/