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+--- Thread: The (unofficial) Scoring Central Contest - Planning (/showthread.php?tid=294)
RE: The (unofficial) Scoring Central Contest - Mattias Westlund - 11-08-2017
(11-08-2017, 10:55 PM)Otto Halmén Wrote: At least sforzando and LinuxSampler support FLAC. Is there a prominent .sfz player that doesn't support FLAC?
The only potentially "prominent" szf player I can think of is rgc:audio's original SFZ Player. And no, I can't think of one single reason why you would want to use that one in this day and age, but considering how hard it is to convince people to let go of their x86 plugs I might as well mention it.
RE: The (unofficial) Scoring Central Contest - tonaliszt - 11-08-2017
I don't visit here often, but I'm interested for sure.
RE: The (unofficial) Scoring Central Contest - Samulis - 11-09-2017
(11-08-2017, 11:21 PM)Mattias Westlund Wrote:(11-08-2017, 10:55 PM)Otto Halmén Wrote: At least sforzando and LinuxSampler support FLAC. Is there a prominent .sfz player that doesn't support FLAC?
The only potentially "prominent" szf player I can think of is rgc:audio's original SFZ Player. And no, I can't think of one single reason why you would want to use that one in this day and age, but considering how hard it is to convince people to let go of their x86 plugs I might as well mention it.
Interesting, I actually was not aware of this! I don't really use FLAC ever (not sure why, just never have), but I think in the spirit of the original contest as being about "resourcefulness of sampling" rather than "resourcefulness of codecs", it'd be best just to stick with .ogg and .wav so tradeoffs are clear.
RE: The (unofficial) Scoring Central Contest - Otto Halmén - 11-09-2017
Try it! FLAC, being designed around fast decoding at the expense of slow encoding, seems to be well-suited for sample libraries. Most samples I've converted shrink to about 50%, which greatly relaxes disk access requirements. Kontakt rolled their own lossless audio format, but I know UVI, sforzando, LinuxSampler, and TX16Wx support FLAC. It's a proven concept.
RE: The (unofficial) Scoring Central Contest - Samulis - 11-09-2017
Well that's all fine and good, but again, the point of the contest is to prove what you can do with limited space. If something has benefits but no drawbacks, it turns into "just another hurdle" for folks to go through, thus making the contest more difficult and time consuming (not to mention less fun) to participate in than it already will be, as virtually everyone will batch convert to FLAC if they want to take advantage of that space.
It's sort of like a composition contest where you can only write for one instrument instance, but someone finds an instrument that somehow magically manages to put every orchestral instrument in a single keyboard in a usable way. You'd have to be pretty dumb to not use it, but using it would require downloading some special plugin that basically makes the contest take longer and more effort from everyone, thus lowering the chances of people making it through to completion.
Not to mention, flac doesn't exactly have universal support in the consumer and low-end professional markets, so a lot of end users would have no way of editing, previewing, or working with the sounds without downloading more software, e.g. Audacity and/or VLC. I also don't know how other non-sfz samplers behave with flac, and I know there are at least several that only will work with .wav for one reason or another. By providing .wav (which, for transfer, can compress with .rar to about 50% or even much less), users have a 100% universal format to work with, which is basically the whole point behind SFZ being an open format. I would surmise part of the reason Garritan/MM use Flac and proprietary technology/formats in their libraries is a matter of passive DRM to reduce the ability of customers to edit or steal samples.
EDIT: I know folks here are all pretty tech-savvy, but keep in mind, I've had to explain how to copy and paste files to customers on more than one occasion. Batch converting 50 samples seems easy to us, but I am sure there are many, many musicians out there who wouldn't have the slightest clue where to begin. It's a challenge enough to cut samples for someone who has never done it before, but asking them to then batch convert and then check sizes and retry with different compressions to make things fit, etc. is a lot to ask of people who don't much use computers beyond the "narrow path" between their favorite applications.
RE: The (unofficial) Scoring Central Contest - Samulis - 11-19-2017
Alright... I just finished filming most of the first video today, which discusses microphone selection and setup. Unfortunately the camera mic sort of sucks, so I have to go back and re-record a bunch with a proper mic hooked up. Regardless, I hope to have a video up within the next two weeks, with another (thankfully much much easier to make) one that goes over editing samples, and then finally another straightforward one that discusses basic SFZ scripting. All in all, I hope to get the contest off the ground by the 2nd or 3rd week of December, with the first stage ending around the middle of January, and the second stage (composition part) ending perhaps the 1st of March.
RE: The (unofficial) Scoring Central Contest - Samulis - 11-23-2017
I have put together a first draft with the first portion of the video on 'recording' (up to the end of mic usage). I'd like some input on-
1. any information you feel is missing.
2. any information you feel is superfluous.
3. the pacing, structure, and content.
EDIT: UPDATED! Now 9 min. long
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b4wP5AGLKA (don't share)
There's still about another 7-10 minutes of final length to be added, and this is just part 1. You can see why this is taking a while.
RE: The (unofficial) Scoring Central Contest - Samulis - 12-16-2017
Alright, so I decided to build a "part I" that goes before the "part I" I was working on before that explains more of how sampling works fundamentally. Yesterday i got to recording and I ended up editing pretty much all day... it's already 27 minutes!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB75xMVolAo
Let me know if you all have any thoughts.
Edit: re-shot the velocity portion, editing now.
RE: The (unofficial) Scoring Central Contest - Samulis - 12-18-2017
Alright, I did a new version of that Part I-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdGtVnw7qrk
Improved the portion talking about historical sample libraries, added a quick overview of MIDI (probably too quick, but hey, trying to not make this any longer), and some other fixes.
RE: The (unofficial) Scoring Central Contest - Chris Heinen - 01-03-2018
Hi,
I'm a latecomer to this but I'd be interested in participating if it's still possible. My sfz instrument contribution would come from samples of my acoustic guitar. The last forum post looks like Dec. 17 so could someone (I guess Samulis) update? From what I could follow, it looked like there were some open questions regarding allowing FLAC files and project milestone dates. I've watched the videos (very informative) and I'm currently spending time reading through various web documents on sfz files, etc.
Looking forward to participating...
Thanks,
CH