[freepats] Freepats 2.0

[ml at distasis.com]

John Lewis wrote:
>I am going to attempt to download the entire Freepats website and store
>it under git. I am also going to open an issue with Wildmidi and Debian
>about this.

I think there is a git repository.  Don't remember if it has all of
Freepats.  Think it has some of the programs.  You may just want to fork
the programs that are already in git.  I remember seeing the midi to
text/text to midi converter in a git repository.

Not sure how much luck you'll have with Debian and Wildmidi.  I opened an
issue years ago about Timidity++ being out of date and not offering all
the features of the latest version.  I was specifically interested in the
Karaoke capabilities which were improved in the source, but a new tarball
was never made of the latest source.  The maintainer never bothered to get
the latest version and just keeps using the old tarball.  Guess it depends
on the maintainers at Debian, but I haven't had much luck with them
updating software.  Typically if I want something updated, I code and
build it myself.

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

I've checked and talked to some of the local computer community/users
groups.  No one's interested in this sort of thing in my area.  That's one
reason it's nice to have groups like this that can reach other areas.

> 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).

Double check the old freepats mailing list archives.  A lot of work was
done to make sure the current version of freepats did not have dubious
samples.  Freepats organizers contacted the owners of many of the samples
and got permission to use them.  I've been searching a lot of
distribution's soundfonts/gus patches.  Many of them are of dubious
origin.  However, the more I searched for public domain or Open Source
licensed options, the more I found the freepats project really did do a
good job of eliminating anything in their collection that might be
questionable and tried to verify permission/licensing for what they
currently have.

For example, I know some distributions have a patch set with smaller gus
patches/soundfonts for older machines.  When I looked into the licensing,
I found out they really didn't have the proper permissions to distribute
it.

Also, check files using a hex editor.  Often you'll find copyrights,
license information or public domain notices in the files.

> 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.

There are some places that will host large files.  Microsoft and Google
offer free file storage up to a certain gigabyte size.  Also, some
projects that host Open Source offer free space to encourage more Open
Source/Free software.  There are some sites that host Creative Commons
audio files as well.


As to the topic of documentation, I'd be happy to help out where I can. 
I'm very familiar with HTML/CSS/JavaScript coding.

Sincerely,
Laura