Raw hardware oscillator samples

[HAL76]

The repository for the XPander only contains sampler files. The Link from the Modular Construction leads to a 404 Error. Alpha Juno is still online. No Sample Download for the Minitaur anymore. [...]

Click the Audio link on the side. Haven't checked all of them yet (super slow downloads) but the Xpander Session 2 saws definitely work.

Thank you, I´ll check that later!

[HAL76]

Prophet X VCO Pack
https://www.thinkersnacks.com/px-vco-pack.html

Are you able to open these? I believe all except the Erebus samples require Prophet X to open them.

right.

[Uncle E]

Minitaur downloads work

[koalaboy]

Prophet X VCO Pack
https://www.thinkersnacks.com/px-vco-pack.html

Are you able to open these? I believe all except the Erebus samples require Prophet X to open them.

right.

It *is* possible, but the legalites of doing so and sharing the results are unknown and perhaps not the best idea at the moment.

[HAL76]

Prophet X VCO Pack
https://www.thinkersnacks.com/px-vco-pack.html

Are you able to open these? I believe all except the Erebus samples require Prophet X to open them.

right.

It *is* possible, but the legalites of doing so and sharing the results are unknown and perhaps not the best idea at the moment.

Are you speaking of sampling analog Oscillators and selling them?

That is 100% legal. But you might get problems if you mention the synth manufacturer (afaik esp. Roland).

[HAL76]

Minitaur downloads work

Jupiter 4 https://github.com/publicsamples/Oberhe ... Miscellany
Xpoander Misc https://github.com/publicsamples/Oberhe ... Miscellany
and Kawai K3

are also still available. But the donload speed is underground.

And I don´t really need them. I had them all and deleted them one day because I needed disk space.

His sampling skills are not the best. All recorded at much too low levels, with amp envelopes, just five ocataves, lots of round robin layers, ... I think I know why he made them available for free.

But the Xpander ...

[koalaboy]

Are you speaking of sampling analog Oscillators and selling them?

That is 100% legal. But you might get problems if you mention the synth manufacturer (afaik esp. Roland).

I actually meant unpacking the ProphetX samples, but your advice is sage and completely relevant as well. Personally I do not believe raw oscillators should be copyrightable considering how much is actually there and that most (if not all) of the 'magic' is actually in the processing and playback of it, but I appreciate that legal teams have much more of a 'growth mindset' in that regard.

I have no interest whatsoever in tangling with corporates and am happy just to bring myself new sounds to play and experiment with.

[HAL76]

Are you speaking of sampling analog Oscillators and selling them?

That is 100% legal. But you might get problems if you mention the synth manufacturer (afaik esp. Roland).

I actually meant unpacking the ProphetX samples, but your advice is sage and completely relevant as well. Personally I do not believe raw oscillators should be copyrightable considering how much is actually there and that most (if not all) of the 'magic' is actually in the processing and playback of it, but I appreciate that legal teams have much more of a 'growth mindset' in that regard.

I have no interest whatsoever in tangling with corporates and am happy just to bring myself new sounds to play and experiment with.

Great. I can just encourge you to go on experimenting.

I ´ve just checked my multisample directrory yesterday and ... I mean I have several thousands now, about 2000 from analog synths. All homegrown and perfectly looped. Lots of "oscillators" among them.

How to say? I mean I have always focussed on sampling. I´m definitely biased to be honest. But from MY perspective - I have checked and tried everything that came to my mind in the last years - sample synthesis is definitely strongly underrated and many people have no clue what they miss.

When we speak of analog oscillators here it should be clear that I don´t just want to reproduce analog synth sounds. That is often possible, but just one possible way to use them. With a sampler you´re not restricted to two oscillators, one signal path or just one type of synthesis. And you can even combine sounds or build a collection by just copying a file.

Samplers open up endless possibilities. And the results may even surpass the results you have generated with the source. Just think of binaural stereo effects, frequency balance or the density of a sound with four layers...

[koalaboy]

Exactly. You generate sound in any and all ways, and then capture/process/modulate that sound to generate more.

Sometimes it's musical, sometimes just more material for next time.

So much fun.

[Uncle E]

FWIW, the Prophet-X Erebus samples automap perfectly in Blofeld.

[HAL76]

Exactly. You generate sound in any and all ways, and then capture/process/modulate that sound to generate more.

Sometimes it's musical, sometimes just more material for next time.

So much fun.

If it´s not "musical" you have to make it. Usable.

I´m always again surprised when I hear other peoples creations.

Me personally - I´m going beyond what we often call "musical" these days. Very small, rhythmic sounds. Pedal distortion. Percussive Stuff. Raw Sounds. Odd Materials. Filter on top and you have your "musical" rhythmic bass again. Or maybe a weird but exceprional sequencer sound. Or just something. Unique.

You might try a sampler for synthwave stuff if you want to "nail the 80s sound". But that is not all you can do as mentioned already. It all depends on what you put into it, right?

[aciddose]

Weird thing is, the oscillator on these synths could be switched between 3 or 4 shapes. Then why have 50 different samples of it?

Not only would single cycles not capture the full essence of an analog oscillator, even long multi-second samples wouldn't work. You'd need hundreds of samples including the base frequency components which are typically masked by low-frequency noise. You'd also want 96k, 24-bit samples to capture the purest image possible while accommodating for the natural noise floor of the raw oscillator output (albeit typically far below -80 dB, not always so.)

Samples being impacted by that noise is what makes them far less usable overall, but nonetheless a true scientific sample is a discretization of objective reality - it's the best thing we have to compare against - while everything else is abstract. The "models" we use as hypotheses and theory based, rooted in the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, Fourier theorem and so forth. These models themselves are only approximations to the best of our ability to measure and record or sample that reality.

If we can't fully recreate samples this is most likely because we have inadequate samples, not because it is mathematically impossible. It's merely an issue of the computational complexity of accurately modelling the systems we know via the approximating methodologies we currently use.

At the end of the day there is a divide between reality, which is thought to be continuous (of some form) and our discretizations where models break down. All models are based upon discretizations of reality, and all of them fail at edge cases. This is partly limited to our ability to accurately measure continuous reality having itself limits in accurate discretization.

Both things are valuable, and ultimately without reality (analog) there is no discretization (digital.)

[aciddose]

For example you might place an oscillator with a scientific "clean" power supply in an isolating chamber to minimize EMI (radio interference and external noise) such as a multi-layer Faraday cage. I'm not sure how this is achieved in practice, but I've heard it is possible to manage something like -138 decibels peak noise floor in absolute ideal conditions which is much less than the -144.5 we'd expect for 24-bit. In realistic situations next to noisy PC hardware and in a polluted radio garbage environment I don't think you could hope to approximate that.

We can't get better measurements than that due to the properties of the electronic circuits we currently use. We can either measure averages which reduces the noise but also the temporal accuracy, or we can sample close to instantaneously with a lot of noise. There is a trade-off not too distant from the quantum mechanics thing related to the Fourier transform: you can either get one or the other but not both at once.

We may one day develop some new field that replaces the field of electronics and solves this issue, but, as things stand we're facing the ultimate limits of how far we can progress in terms of improving models and taking cleaner samples. We're getting shoved up against physical reality.

[aciddose]

More important is that samples could never capture the behavioral properties of oscillator circuits such as dual oscillators having a tendency to soft-sync near frequency multiples associated with their bypass capacitors and inter-node leakage along the power supply and ground rails. Once you've got a complex synthesizer with three oscillators and multiple filters it gets insanely complex to accurately model, which is one reason modular synthesizers are still quite popular. If you want nutty behavior you can't possibly wrap your head around and have no chance to figure out, grab a modular with 40+ modules of various sorts. More is better for mind-warping misbehaviors especially when something is going wrong with power supply or high frequency and EMI bypass failures.