Free Choir VSTs

[bigcat1969]

30 'patches' spread across 5 'instruments'

http://www.mediafire.com/file/z81epkzifu...Choirs.zip

License: The dataset is made available by Google Inc. under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.

[Paul Battersby]

(01-30-2018, 05:04 PM)bigcat1969 Wrote: 30 'patches' spread across 5 'instruments'

Are these instruments Kontakt or Maize?

(01-30-2018, 05:04 PM)bigcat1969 Wrote: The dataset is made available by Google Inc.

You mention these come from Google. Does Google have a repository of free samples? I tried searching but didn't have any success finding a Google choir sample or other instrument, repository.

[bigcat1969]

Hey Paul.
These are Maize though I've also got the Kontakt instruments on my harddrive.

I explain and link to the massive sampleset here...
http://bigcatinstruments.blogspot.com/20...ments.html
http://bcvsts.blogspot.com/2017/07/nsi-instruments.html

Overtime I hope to create a fairly large kontakt collection of them and some Maize. I can upload the kontakt choral instruments which use the wave files and not nkis if you want? Note that quite a number of the samples are dups in some cases. Each instrument is released as 5 velocity layers and for instance the pianos really do have five, but the vocals and strings quite often have from one to three and the ff and mf samples are identical and the the mp, p and pp are identical. In this case I have gotten rid of the dups so you might be better off grabbing my knotakt stuff and using those waves as they are labeled, sorted, undupped, etc... Of course that presumes I get the instruments done in a timely fashion which may not be true. I've got all 30 acoustic vocals, 10 pianos, 20 flutish and 35 strings done plus a few more out of thousands of 'patches' so its a very long term project.

Anyway there you have it.

[Paul Battersby]

(02-02-2018, 10:56 PM)bigcat1969 Wrote: I explain and link to the massive sampleset here...
http://bigcatinstruments.blogspot.com/20...ments.html

Ah, yes. I recall looking into Magenta in the past and deciding it would be a lot of work to sort through the samples.

(02-02-2018, 10:56 PM)bigcat1969 Wrote: I can upload the kontakt choral instruments which use the wave files and not nkis if you want?

I may take you up on that offer at some time in the future. Tempting though it is to play around with the samples now, I really should wrap up my most recent library update and get back to making music. Tinkering with my sample library could easily consume all my time if I wanted it to.

[bigcat1969]

I hear you man. I'm amazed how much you have already done and often recommend VPO.
See...
https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic...4&t=499273

Just to tempt you, the 30 choir patches in what should be fairly usable form. I didn't edit or normalize them so they can be tightened if someone really wants...
http://www.mediafire.com/file/r4l6ylvk50...ontakt.zip

I think these are all in wave format. I uploaded them some time ago so I might be wrong...
http://www.mediafire.com/file/9y8y879njn...Part_1.zip
http://www.mediafire.com/file/epcij19idi...Part_1.zip
http://www.mediafire.com/file/n8t7rjg088...lume_1.zip
http://www.mediafire.com/file/31b3lfeafz...lume_1.zip

[Paul Battersby]

(02-03-2018, 12:04 AM)bigcat1969 Wrote: I hear you man. I'm amazed how much you have already done and often recommend VPO.

Thanks! I really appreciate you helping people find my library.

(02-03-2018, 12:04 AM)bigcat1969 Wrote: Just to tempt you,

I'm tempted.

(02-03-2018, 12:04 AM)bigcat1969 Wrote: 30 choir patches ...
Acoustic_Brass_Volume_1

To start, I checked out the choir and brass samples. The choir would probably be the easiest for me to work with because it's fine for the samples to be just "choir" and separated into different vowels but for the brass, trying to separate the samples into trumpet, french horn, trombone, tuba could be tricky.

Looking at the NSynth site, I'm a little confuse how it works. The site seems to suggest that the sounds are used to train, validate or test something, (which set did you use?) and I haven't figured out the naming of the directories yet. I get the part of the file name that indicates the pitch and the velocity but what separates "NST Acoustic Brass 00 Samples" from "NST Acoustic Brass 01 Samples" for example? I can see some directories contain sustain and some contain staccato articulations but I haven't figured out how to map the directories to instruments yet. Which is trombone, which is french horn or are they even organized that way? Obviously the lowest pitched notes are tuba and the highest are trumpet but for those in between, it's not obvious from the directory or file names.

[bigcat1969]

Thanks for making VPO! When it first came out I thought 'That's nice but do we need it?' Now I'm thinking 'Holy Cow, Sonatina for 2020.'

I downloaded the massive 25 or 30 gig or something full collection and I've been slowly organizing it by instrument type and down to directories for single instruments and renaming. It is unwieldy. That is one reason I'm planing on leaving things in wave in Kontakt so others can use it all easier. Right now I'm generally concentrating on orchestral instruments, piano and voice. Each of these has under 100 'patches' so it should be doable.

Yeah Choirs are pretty easy. I organized them into 5 vsts full, low, middle 1 & 2 and high. I'm thinking I'll do that range thing for the Kontakt choirs along with Strings, Brass, Flute and Reed and also list the articulation. If I can figure it out. I must admit sometimes I'm thinking is that spiccato, staccato or pizzicato? After all a lot of orchestral packs these days pretty much just have high and low 'instruments'. Probably not ideal but I figure better than not putting them out.
Pianos, Electric Bass, Guitars and other band instruments should be pretty easy to categorize.

[Paul Battersby]

(02-03-2018, 04:45 PM)bigcat1969 Wrote: Thanks for making VPO! When it first came out I thought 'That's nice but do we need it?' Now I'm thinking 'Holy Cow, Sonatina for 2020.'

My goal, was to see what Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra could become with more articulations and access to more recent free samples. Hopefully I got close to that.

[bigcat1969]

Finished up the 35 flutes. Some of them are really weird.
If you get bored Sam (yeah right) you might tell the rest of us what the ones at like 20-35 are. They certainly aren't normal flutes.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/a83kmcdf8y...ontakt.zip

[Samulis]

There definitely are some interesting flutes in there! 27 & 28 appear to be synths. There were definitely some non-concert flutes. 31 is a tenor recorder and 35 is a soprano recorder, but I don't think either are mine- I did a test against the VSCO 2 Pro recorders and they didn't match either. None of the concert flutes seemed to match VSCO either, but I could be wrong on that.

I still have some concerns about the legality of the collection. Last I checked, it said on the page for the project that they more or less 'ripped' all the samples from a mix of non-commercial and commercial sample libraries. Literally every sample company on earth does not allow their samples to be "reverse engineered" or otherwise cut out in this fashion. Even if they cut down the sample rate and made them mono and whatnot, it's still a little too questionable for my tastes, but hey, if anyone raises an issue, it will be Google that has to deal with it.

Listening through the flutes, most of them sound like they were either re-sampled with reverb or were recorded in an actual concert hall originally. I noticed at least one that had the clear sound of a release tail. Overall, some of these sound like really good flute sample sets, like, pay a bunch of money to a good player and rent a concert hall 'good'. The vibrato pattern on a good number of them in particular is very professional and tasteful. Although I am unable to generate any actual matches, I find it extremely suspicious that they managed to find over a dozen concert flute sample sets for free on the internet at that quality when all of us have been struggling for years to find a good sampled flute on here for SSO and VPO and whatnot. There's SSO, VSCO, maybe 2-3 ancient soundfonts (which I doubt sound as good as some of these), and maybe two or three other free sample sets out there somewhere. Yet here is about 20 different flutes, including no less than four ensemble patches... It really just doesn't add up to me.