Free Sound Formats ???

[aorphia]

Since the Alesis Fusion can handle a few different sound formats
(SF2, aif, aiff and akp).

Does anyone know where I can get free professional sounds, so that I can load them into my Alesis Fusion? I am already aware of the Free Hollow Sun Sounds and I have them already.

I'm interested in only professional sounds such as... KORG, E-mu, Motif etc.

Also, if anyone knows of any Layered sounds, that would would be great as well.

I'm not seeking drum sounds.

Thank you for your time, efforts and consideration.

Respectfully,

AorphiA ;D

[Hollow Sun]

aorphia said:

Since the Alesis Fusion can handle a few different sound formats
(SF2, aif, aiff and akp).

Does anyone know where I can get free professional sounds, so that I can load them into my Alesis Fusion?

There are no end of soundfonts to download for free but whether they are "professional" or not remains to be seen (heard). My limited experience with them is that they are not worth the bandwidth. They are typically weak sounding, poorly multi-sampled, badly edited and badly programmed sounds (often badly looped - if at all) provided by well meaning amateurs. There are some good ones but it's hard to distinguish them from the thousands out there.

Also, a point worth bearing in mind that many of them are illegal being SF conversions of commercial sound library (one SF site I discovered primarily comprised illegally converted material ... including my own unfortunately!).

aorphia said:

I'm interested in only professional sounds such as... KORG, E-mu, Motif etc.

Any Korg, Roland, Motif - whatever - sounds that may be out there are, by default, illegal as it is a contravention of those manufacturers' copyright to sample their samples and/or use their registered trademark to promote it (unless you have permission to do so of course).

Now, whether the legality of such freebie downloads is an issue to you is a matter between you and your conscience.

A Google search for 'Free soundfonts' or 'WAV samples' will lead you to hundreds of sites offering goodies for download. Whether they are any good, however, is for you to evaluate. Sadly "free" and "professional" are usually mutually exclusive terms


Steve

[aorphia]

Thanks for the input.

You can take any professional sound, such as Korg, E-mu, Motif etc. and do a slight modification of it and then it becomes legal.

By layering two different sounds. Take the primary sound of interest, then take another weaker sound (volume adjustment) etc. and combine the two, where as, the primary sound is not affected as much, but... by layering two sounds together, it makes for better sounding and creates a new modified sound.

As this is legal, as stated by top sound designers.

Again much thanks,

AorphiA ;D

[sjames]

I'm sure this must be true . . .

I was going through the presets on my Roland GW-7 a few weeks back and was surprised to come across Ancestral and Prologue . . . sound familiar?

Though I must say that Hollow Sun's versions are much better!

;D ;D ;D

[markone]

aorphia said:

Thanks for the input.

You can take any professional sound, such as Korg, E-mu, Motif etc. and do a slight modification of it and then it becomes legal.

By layering two different sounds. Take the primary sound of interest, then take another weaker sound (volume adjustment) etc. and combine the two, where as, the primary sound is not affected as much, but... by layering two sounds together, it makes for better sounding and creates a new modified sound.

As this is legal, as stated by top sound designers.

Again much thanks,

AorphiA ;D

Well. Hollow Sun are "Top sound Designers" Many of their sounds appear in all sorts of places (Including products by the "Big 3")

And Steve, I think will disagree with you completely.

Look at it this way.

Someone hires a pro studio. and an engineer, and a musician, and a steinway piano, and spends the next week sampling the piano. Add up the costs. hundreds if not thousands of dollars/pounds/euros/whatevers.

And someone comes along and dicks around with the loop points, adds a bit of reverb, and dicks with the EQ, and converts it to a soundfont, and puts it up for free?

This is not legal. It is copyright infringement, and someone doing that should get their asses sued.

/rant mode off... I'll shut up now

[Hollow Sun]

sjames said:

I'm sure this must be true . . .

I was going through the presets on my Roland GW-7 a few weeks back and was surprised to come across Ancestral and Prologue . . . sound familiar?

Though I must say that Hollow Sun's versions are much better!

;D ;D ;D

The HS sounds were made on other equipment (Microwave layered with Prophet 5, etc.) and sounded like those presets so were named as such.


Steve

[sjames]

Thanks for the clarification Steve . . . I was just surprised to come across those two presets on another synth after seeing them in Hollow Sun #10. And these are two of my most favourite of your sounds so far . . .

As for the legal debate . . . yes I agree when it is put like that!

However, I have been spending a fair bit of time (too much in fact) exploring the Soundfont links posted by BastMaus and I have rejected a large percentage of these. But I have found that some sites (such as SoniVox) are not only professional sound designers selling their own sounds, but often have a few freebies such as some really good bass guitar slides, snare rolls, cymbal rolls and cowbells. These are only little scraps, but they are good quality and quite useful.

I've recently downloaded a (free) copy of Creative's Vienna Soundfont Studio which gives some very in depth control over Soundfonts before converting to the Fusion . . .

[Hollow Sun]

aorphia said:

You can take any professional sound, such as Korg, E-mu, Motif etc. and do a slight modification of it and then it becomes legal.

Nope! A popular misconception.

Sampling a sample-based Korg or a Roland is no different to sampling, say, the Garritan String Orchestra VSTi ... you are sampling samples which are the copyright of the holder.

aorphia said:

By layering two different sounds. Take the primary sound of interest, then take another weaker sound (volume adjustment) etc. and combine the two, where as, the primary sound is not affected as much, but... by layering two sounds together, it makes for better sounding and creates a new modified sound.

You can 'disguise' the source in that way but technically you are still sampling samples so....!

aorphia said:

As this is legal, as stated by top sound designers.

You might find that was a while back. I don't think anyone really considered the legality issues in the early days, not even the manufacturers. And things were very different back then... so - someone samples a D50 or an M1 ... so what? Back then, it would have made absolutely no impression on those products's sales even if the guy gave a few copies to his friends and it would have been more trouble than it's worth for the manufacturer to chase it (if they even found out).

Nowadays tho, someone samples a Motif or a Fantom (or a Fusion!) and can make it available at no end of sites where thousands - tens of thousands! - of people can (and will) download them for free. Now, that DOES impact on those products' sales and it's no wonder that every major manufacturer has teams of people scouring the net looking for such contraventions. And if they find one, they WILL pounce and they WILL win - Roland in particular have a 'zero-tolerance' approach now.


Steve

[Hollow Sun]

sjames said:

But I have found that some sites (such as SoniVox) are not only professional sound designers selling their own sounds, but often have a few freebies such as some really good bass guitar slides, snare rolls, cymbal rolls and cowbells. These are only little scraps, but they are good quality and quite useful.

Yes. Maybe I was a bit dismissive of SFs - there are some very good ones available.


Steve

[Hollow Sun]

markone said:

Look at it this way......

Yep!

I worked for a leading independent sound library developer and the owner ploughed something like $50 or $60k of his own money into a project (venue hire, specialised equipment hire, hire of recording engineers, programmers, sample editing and looping specialists ... not to mention marketing, ads, hire of musos for audio demos, etc.). Within a week of the product being available, it was available as a soundfont on some dodgy site somewhere and he didn't even recoup his costs let alone make any profit for the development of further products


Steve

[gwenhwyfaer]

admin said:

Nowadays tho, someone samples a Motif or a Fantom (or a Fusion!) and can make it available at no end of sites where thousands - tens of thousands! - of people can (and will) download them for free. Now, that DOES impact on those products' sales and it's no wonder that every major manufacturer has teams of people scouring the net looking for such contraventions. And if they find one, they WILL pounce and they WILL win - Roland in particular have a 'zero-tolerance' approach now.

Of course that might be due to Dream SA nicking their GM library wholesale for distribution with the SAM range of synth chips! Roland (quite correctly) sued their arses off; I wouldn't be surprised if they're now adopting a "fool me twice, shame on me" attitude to copyright infringement.

But the thing is, a couple of things have changed since the days of the D50 and M1. As Steve rightly points out, distribution of a set of samples is a lot easier these days. Previously there had to be some physical media involved, or at least a good long wait whilst someone downloaded 32Mb of samples at 5k a second over a 2p per minute phone line - nowadays, I can download a CD image in about a third of the time it would take to even listen to it.

But also, nowadays the CPUs in most people's computers are now fast enough that they put the custom chips used in synths to shame - so the only real audible difference between the Fantom X and Joe's Freeware Sample Player VSTi is the sample set. The difference is that Joe doesn't have the cash to spend a year in a studio with the London Philharmonic sampling every instrument, nor does he have 20 years' worth of high quality samples that he took from all the synths he ever spent more than a fortnight with - he'll maybe chuck in a few known freebie soundfonts, and then say "go find your own". So suddenly the soundfont is where the money is.

...Which is also, I suspect, why the smaller synth companies have focused more on virtual analogue technology. You can successfully model a Minimoog with intelligence alone; you don't need to sink money into sample sets too - and your IP is much less easily lifted. It could also be argued that the dependence on samples itself is a bit fragile - after all, the preponderance of freely available drum loop samples has led to an awful lot of rather "samey" tracks using them, and it can't be too long before some company tries funding its sample acquisitions by licensing their samples for royalties rather than the current one-off payments (ie. "giving them away" until you find their lawyers at your door asking for the 0.1% of your hit single's ticket price that you owe them); the drive for creativity has also fuelled the VA market, as people go looking for ways to create their own sounds that don't involve starting with someone else's.

But my misgivings about the use of samples aside, if you're going to claim a creative work as "yours", it strikes me that you morally have to do something substantially original with your source material. For samples, I'd say that means twisting it out of recognition, or doing something on the same order as that. Even if it were legal to just tweak loop points and EQs and release it, I'd say that whoever does that is a rip-off merchant in moral terms. But then, I like my free stuff to be truly free, rather than just sprung from its jail cell and timidly awaiting recapture...

[aorphia]

As Quoted by the Fusion Club admin: Also, a point worth bearing in mind that many of them are illegal being SF conversions of commercial sound library (one SF site I discovered primarily comprised illegally converted material ... including my own unfortunately!).

Therefore, you state that the Hollow Sun website is also comprised of illegal converted material.

I think you might have slightly misunderstood what I had stated.

When you take "two different sounds" and combine those two different sounds with slight modification being on the weaker sound, but the two sounds are still combined and then modified to become a new sound sample, this... is 100% legal, as long as it is "different" from the original copyrighted sound sample.

If I go and make a sound sample of a Yamaha Violin and say... Korg goes and makes a sound sample of a Yamaha Violin, then those sound samples being from the same instrument, being the same, except some slight difference maybe... both of us could then copyright our samples and we could not sue each other.

All this is a bit strange, when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, because... if I create a song using a copyrighted sample and publish it as a song, then why can't I be sued by the original creator of the sample? And... believe me, there are lots of Hip Hop and Rap artist that takes a copyrighted sample, add some words to it and some wind up becoming superstars.

The way sounds are created in the first place is, through a Synth, wheather it be a module or an actual keyboard, unless I am clearly missing something and I'd appreciate it, if this is true, that you explain how sounds are created or what platform is used, besides real world instruments.

Respectfully,

AorphiA ;D

[Failed Muso]

aorphia said:

As Quoted by the Fusion Club admin: Also, a point worth bearing in mind that many of them are illegal being SF conversions of commercial sound library (one SF site I discovered primarily comprised illegally converted material ... including my own unfortunately!).

Therefore, you state that the Hollow Sun website is also comprised of illegal converted material.

How on earth did you get to that conclusion ?!?! I can assure you that none of the material released by HS is in any way illegal. In fact, we have been the victim of having our material ripped off and made into illegal SF's on many occasions. In most cases, a swift informal cease and desist sorts things out, but by that time it's often too late.

aorphia said:

When you take "two different sounds" and combine those two different sounds with slight modification being on the weaker sound, but the two sounds are still combined and then modified to become a new sound sample, this... is 100% legal, as long as it is "different" from the original copyrighted sound sample.

If only it were that simple ! If I chop a Ford and a FIAT car in half and weld them together, then try and sell it, do you think Ford & FIAT would allow me ?? No.

aorphia said:

If I go and make a sound sample of a Yamaha Violin and say... Korg goes and makes a sound sample of a Yamaha Violin, then those sound samples being from the same instrument, being the same, except some slight difference maybe... both of us could then copyright our samples and we could not sue each other.

Sampling acoustic instruments is a different kettle of fish.

aorphia said:

All this is a bit strange, when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, because... if I create a song using a copyrighted sample and publish it as a song, then why can't I be sued by the original creator of the sample? And... believe me, there are lots of Hip Hop and Rap artist that takes a copyrighted sample, add some words to it and some wind up becoming superstars.

Virtually all sample libraries have a licence that allows their use in the context of a piece of music or other creative process, but prevents illegal copying and distribution as samples. It is a distinct difference.

aorphia said:

The way sounds are created in the first place is, through a Synth, wheather it be a module or an actual keyboard, unless I am clearly missing something and I'd appreciate it, if this is true, that you explain how sounds are created or what platform is used, besides real world instruments.

When sampling synths, it's a minefield. I can create an original sound using a VA type synth and sample that with no problems. But if I sample a sound created by an instrument that uses samples itself, I'd be liable for litigation. That's a very basic overview, but hopefully illustrates on of the differences.

[aorphia]

Thanks for answering my questions and also, clearing that up for me.

Respectfully,

AorphiA ;D

[Hollow Sun]

Therefore, you state that the Hollow Sun website is also comprised of illegal converted material.

Not at all.

aorphia said:

And... believe me, there are lots of Hip Hop and Rap artist that takes a copyrighted sample, add some words to it and some wind up becoming superstars.

They get clearance to use that sample first. If they don't, they can expect to be sued by the copyright holder (and if their record was a hit and made $millions, they can expect to hand over a good proportion of that to the copyright holder!!).

aorphia said:

The way sounds are created in the first place is, through a Synth, wheather it be a module or an actual keyboard, unless I am clearly missing something and I'd appreciate it, if this is true, that you explain how sounds are created or what platform is used, besides real world instruments.

It's a huge grey area.

* You can make up sounds on an old analogue synth and sample those without problems but sample presets from a current VA synth and you may have trouble.

* You used to be able to sample sounds from sample-based synths (especially if the synth was long out of production) but not these days (even more so now now that old synths are being re-cycled in software - e.g. D50, M1 and Wavestation).

* You simply cannot sample from a current sample-based product. You can go some way to disguising them by layering as you describe but if the copyright holder can detect their samples/sounds, the same conditions apply.

A lot depends on how you present the sounds as well. For example, if in the process of explaing S+S synthesis, you include a handful sample examples, chances are that the manufacturer will take a pragmatic approach. If, however, you release a CD called 'Ultimate Roland Fantom', expect to get your collar felt!

And a lot depends on whether you use the copyright holder's trade mark.

All sorts of variables.

The problem is not so much sampling other products - if a few samples of a few Tritons or Fantoms were floating around, I doubt the manufacturers would bother.

The problem is the widespread abuse of the practice with people making whole rafts of samples from these products widely available to tens of thousands of people - that is hurting manufacturers' business and so they are taking a much harder line on the practice purely out of self preservation.


Steve