SFZ Instrument Maker (Philharmonia Edition)

will be checking this on vista32. (can it work/be made to work for sf2 as well?)

It doesn't work yet on vista but I'm working on it. I can get it to support sf2 if there is adequate documentation on that format.

Dear Hathor's.

I'm trying to use this SFZ creator which seems nice.but I have a question :

- After the installation I have pressed the "Build Database" and it has created 19 instrum and 39 percussion indexed (13683 samples indexed)

- Then I pressed the "Download samples" and it starts to download all the samples from MakeMusic.

which are stored as .zip in the C:\Users\.....\Documents\Samples\temp Folder.

My question is : Must I wait until it has dowloaded all the samples? or can i process one sample to my choice (after downloading it). Mus I unzip the file or shall the program do it ?

I'm asking this because the button "Generate sfz" is always inactive (it cannot be pressed)

Can you explain me synthetically which is the procedure to follow ? I thought it was possible to download 1 instrument, put it in the correct folder (Instruments ?) unzipped and run the program to.

create the sfz file for that instrument. .Is this correct ? But why the "generate" button is always non active ?

Thanks.

The way it is set up now it downloads all of the samples, unzips them, and converts to .wav format. Once that is finished then you can generate sfz's from the instruments. If the process doesn't complete properly then you may need to click "download samples" again. You can see which ones have processed and which ones have not by clicking on the Sample Data tab. If they are green checkmarks they will have downloaded and can be used to make instruments. If they are red X's then they have not been processed yet. If you need further help feel free to ask additional questions; I haven't updated this software since December since it seems to not be that popular but I will put in more energy into it if i know people are actively using it.

honestly, i haven't really used sfz but i'm curious about the extended.

form of sf2, and surely many people are, if it is supported adequately,.

so it has got to be a worthwhile endeavour. i'm going to check out your.

latest version this morning.

let me know how it goes, it's still beta as i'm new to sfz format but it is a good starting point, it's not feasible to manually build instruments from 13,000 files but with a few tweaks of the sfz file it shouldn't be much work to have some free high quality multi-timbral symphonic instruments :)

loving the term and conditions ;-) haha.

no worky on vista?

build database, then.

error message, had to quite, not Win7.

ran it again, it seemed to have a database, entries on screen:

but then dialog: not win7 or newer, and i had to foce it to quit..because.

it kept sending messages-would it have been 13000+ error messages? :-)

Unfortunately I don't think it works on Vista. I may have Vista installed somewhere in a virtual machine though so perhaps I can debug the issue that causes it to break on that O/S.

Any way you can get support for XP? Really would like to try this as well.

When I code the cross-platform version of it then it will run on all O/S's including XP.

Running on Windows 8.1. As I download the samples I've begun to get a bunch of consecutive errors that read.

"Value of '[number]' is not valid for 'Value'. 'Value' should be between 'minimum' and 'maximum'.

"Parameter name: 'Value'"

The samples are being downloaded to the temporary folder, so I guess the software is functional, but all of those dialog boxes are annoying. Any idea why that's happening?

I haven't updated this code since December so it's possible that Philharmonia's site changed slightly or that their site went down while you were in the process of downloading. Where specifically in the process did it start popping up error messages? Were you clicking around on the samples while it was still in the process of downloading them? I'll check it on my end to see if something has changed on their end.

I'm sorry, I don't remember when I saw the issue, I was usually letting it run in the background. I don't remember if I did anything to cause it.

I've tried uninstalling/reinstalling the whole thing and rebuilt the database. The same error -- more specifically, a bunch of these errors - came up at some time in the middle of downloading banjo samples. Four in a row each complaining about the same value before increasing by one. When it started downloading bass clarinet samples, the dialog boxes kept appearing but the number started over.

I updated the app to fix a couple things I saw in testing. The new version I just have it with the database already indexed since it takes a while to run that process.

The application you have designed sounds like an awesome time saver. I have been thinking of making my own SFZ files from this amazing sample set for a long time, but it has always seemed like too much work. Now, maybe I can get something done on this, however, I don't think your software finds the loop points and adds that info to the SFZ file, does it? That actually seems like the hardest part of the process to me. Do you have any software in mind that can make that job easier for me?

The main issue I have is that the SFZ format is sparsely documented and my knowledge of how SFZ's are supposed to work is limited. It's fairly trivial to add features to improve the SFZ file exports if I know what a proper format is supposed to look like. Since you've been making your own SFZ's by hand, your feedback would be instrumental to greatly improving the usefulness of the application, such that the SFZ files actually become usable as virtual instruments, rather than only automating the bare basics as a starting point for SFZ creation (where it's at now). I'd greatly appreciate it if you can download the software and play around with it, and then let me know where to go next to make it fully usable as an SFZ creation tool.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get your app to work completely, but I was happy that it did successfully download all the samples before it errored out of the process. So far I have used the downloaded files to create a wonderful sounding Viola SFZ instrument and plan to create other instruments from them as well. Your concept for this app is great, but unfortunately, editing of these samples is necessary before you can create an SFZ instrument one could be happy with. One main issue is that the there is worthless space at the beginning of each sample which needs to be trimmed off and it isn't the same amount of space needing to be trimmed off of each sample either so a bunch of manual labor is required. The other issue is that there are no loops so the samples only play for a brief split second up to 2 seconds. That can be fixed by creating loop points and saving them to the .wav files--more manual labor which I am happy to do on my own to make the samples suit my needs. My hobby is using virtual instruments to play the classics and making them sound as close as possible to a real performance of the piece.