[Rwp] SFZ Players

Sun Mar 27 19:03:20 EDT 2016

You can use AWave Studio to convert your multi-instrument SF2 files to multiple SFZ instruments. Either extract individual instruments, or dump the whole bank. It’s reasonably accessible. I think Extreme Sample Converter might do this, too, but has been a while since I used it.

I was very annoyed to discover that SFZ doesn’t support pitch glide (portamento)  between notes. It isn’t always desirable to have samples retrigger when I play legato phrases. I read about some cheaty approach involving using CC140, which is supposed to give you the delta between the current note and the last played note, to create a scoop with the pitch envelope. At least that would create a type of glide effect, though the sample would retrigger. Wouldn’t be much worse than the Motif, at least. Only have seen it mentioned. No examples given. The Sforzando people just said they implemented CC140 to avoid having to implement glide, and that we should use that instead. Maybe one of my sources will be able to come up with this damn Cakewalk book.

Bryan

> On Mar 27, 2016, at 6:55 AM, Chris Belle <cb1963 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> 
> All this stuff can sure make the gray matter
> mis-fire, and you really do have a giant brain compared to mine 'grin'.
> Well, I have found a few opcodes here and there, and experimented pulling things from dimension pro anad trial and error, but yeh, all these folks who use sfz sort of depart from the 1.0 spec in their own way, this is kind of like the linux of the sampling world.
> But even with the 1.0 spec, I have found I can do quite a bit,
> for my needs, it beats the heck out of wrestling with gui based libraries that constantly change.
> I did make a simple autohotkey thingy which would click the button, I find it pretty reliable with NVDA if you use screen review on the object nav modes,
> there's a lot more to that sforzando like their sound chips thing, I need to get someone over here sometimes to help me spot up the rest of it, and see what else we can do.
> I don't know if it's mission critical, but there is other stuff on the screen which shows up it would be perfect for me if it would handle multi-tembral sound fonts well, but it kind of pukes when dealing with multi-bank sf2 files.
> I know, that's an old clunky format, but I still have a lot of them I use and good sounds are good sounds the best sf2 player I've seen for a modern DAW these days is the vst synth  font player,
> I believe it can load giga files as well.
> I bought it a while back,
> I buy stuff from places like digital sound factory,
> and voxengo sells drum samples you can fix up yourself, which I like to layer my own snares and such so I can have my key maps laid out how I like so can use all 10 fingers to do rolls and the like,
> much harder to control that sort of thing in kontakt or other of the big players, even if the sounds are great.
> I have found some decent refill packs for sessiondrummer 3 like the Andy Johns stuff, and also dsf,
> and I have modified them to work with sforzando better.
> I figured out how to bring different micing layers in and out when I picked up a complex brush kit here a while back,
> assigning cc values to the different parts top and bottom mic, and
> overheads, much easier than trying to figure out how to do that on kontakt.
> Of course, you just don't have access to everything with those locked libraries.
> I do have the factory kontakt stuff, and use Steves fine hsc set for it,
> but man, what a bear that interface is.
> Well, if I needed it badly, I'd go hire me someone to spot up what ever library,
> but so far have managed to get by with out it.
> But on the possitive side of things, man am I digging what reaper has brought to the table.
> Editable automation, who would have thunk it?
> And item based fx, and moveable links in the chain, all that stuff we wanted for years in sonar and never really had.
> And now the piano roll and such is so much nicer, I checked out the 520 release, and it's even better.
> Nice.
> 
> 
> 
> On 3/26/2016 9:49 PM, Bryan Smart wrote:
>> Sorry. It works here, too. I've tried over half a dozen SFZ/SF2 players, and I get their drawbacks confused, after a time.
>> 
>> In Sforzando, clicking on the preset name, usually "empty", lets me pick another file to load. Would be great if there was a hot key for this, but I can deal.
>> 
>> A friend on Twitter was remarking he couldn't always see the "empty" text, but I'm probably having luck with it, as I have all my plug-ins load in dedicated processes. Had to do that for the Kontakt AHK, so just leave it like that.
>> 
>> Only thing now is that I wish I had a good SFZ format reference. There is the one online for SFZ 1.0, but the 2.0 format isn't online anywhere. Apparently, Cakewalk has copyrighted the spec, only publishes it in a book, and has people pull it down if they post it. The book, "Cakewalk Synthesizers: From Presets to Power User" isn't available in any electronic formats that I've discovered, so far.
>> 
>> Bryan
>> 
>> On Mar 25, 2016, at 9:20 PM, Patrick Perdue <patrick at perdue.audio <mailto:patrick at perdue.audio>> wrote:
>> 
>>> Yeah... it definitely does. I have plenty of Reaper projects with SFZ's loaded. Sforzando remembers the state just fine when the project is reloaded, or copied to another machine, provided all the paths line up.
>>> 
>>> On 3/25/2016 9:11 PM, Chris Belle wrote:
>>>> Bryan, are you sayin that
>>>> sforzando doesn't remember the sfz instrument you loaded when you save a
>>>> reaper project?
>>>> Seems like that worked ok for me, but I'll try it again just to be sure.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On 3/25/2016 9:21 AM, Bryan Smart wrote:
>>>>> Hi, everyone.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I’d like to have a thread about different SFZ player VSTs. I’m trying
>>>>> to find a good one to use. I’ve heard suggestions from people, but I
>>>>> don’t like any of the ones that I’ve seen so far for use in Reaper.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Many here immediately bring up Sforzando as a good SFZ player.
>>>>> However, I find it’s whole arrangement configuration to be a bit
>>>>> obnoxious. The entire plug-in state should be part of the Reaper project.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I’m really looking for something a bit more like RGC SFZ was in SONAR:
>>>>> load an instance, load an SFZ file in to it, and the reference to the
>>>>> SFZ is stored with the VST’s config data as part of the project.
>>>>> Reload the project, and the instance of the VST knows where to go to
>>>>> load its SFZ.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Does anything available do this?
>>>>> 
>>>>> Thank you.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Bryan
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
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