Making a new sfz sampler, need advice on max zones

[kingozrecords]

Hi all, making a 32,64 bit windows VST sfz, and maybe soundfont sampler that might be a bit better than plogue and will offer the same editing and patch making capabilities of grace and directwave.

I plan, along with My opensource initiative (named the VSTplug.com group) to create this in short order; but I was recently optimizing code so as to use less CPU and the issue arise regarding zones and what the best max number of zones might be.

Can a knowledgeable person please advise? Thanks.

[DSmolken]

See if you can get a hold of the TK Drums developer, and find a way to communicate. The extreme kits are by far the biggest SFZ instruments I'm aware of, with over 60000 samples. Not sure how many group, master etc. headers that results in, but I know that with the multiple mics, ride patterns can easily run into max polyphony limits. You can try https://twitter.com/_TKDrums_kousik and see if you can communicate via machine-translated English or whatever. If your sampler can handle those drums without problems, just about anything else should be easy.

You could also look at some organ samples, which can have a lot of stops per key, multiple mics and long samples, so a ton of data and one note can easily eat up dozens of voices, and you can have 10 or more notes playing at once. Not sure what's out there which would already have SFZ, but there probably is - wasn't there some French project a few years ago to sample historical organs which did SFZ?

[kingozrecords]

Historical organs, yes I remember something like that and I have those somewhere I think. OK, TK drums, boy admittedly that sounds over the top lol, a lot of samples. And here I thought it was only one sample per zone .

But, we'll be ready for most sample patches with time stretching. The last thing to commit to is bpm. That in itself is a bit challenging too, it's rarely done but relevant.

I have a piano crescendo roll with one sample re-iterated 400 times in 4 seconds, that raises to 3-4% CPU and that number drops back down to 0 about 3-4 seconds later.

[DSmolken]

I think the SFZ 1 spec might say there should be one unique sample per <region> header, though there can be lots and lots of regions triggered by one MIDI note - I've done 17 regions per note in a prototype I never released. There can also be multiple ways to play the same sample, so I've made instruments with only a couple hundred samples that ended up with something like 10000 total regions, with 1-5 regions being triggered by each key, depending on a lot of locc/hicc stuff.

[kingozrecords]

Ah, thanks - That's a very useful bit of information . But ugh, seriously I have My work cut out for Me. lol.

[DSmolken]

Yeah, instrument devs will always end up wanting to do things you weren't expecting, ha.

[enroe]

Hi all, making a 32,64 bit windows VST sfz, and maybe soundfont sampler that might be a bit better than plogue and will offer the same editing and patch making capabilities of grace and directwave.

Well - that is a veeeeeery ambitious and fascinating project!
I am eagerly looking forward to your project.

[harvon]

well - I'm not at all certain that I understand what I say but...

An instrument like follows would be interesting
* 32/64 bit windows vst
* read samples from file and from daw output
* read/write sf2 and sfz patches and libraries
* 16 channels multitimbral output, free mixing of sf2 and sfz patches
* every channel supports layering of presets even of different types (sf2/sfz)
* supports mono and stereo
* control sets (volume, velocity, adsr, filters etc) that can be set to apply to desired level: whole sampler/channel/ layer/preset
* libraries/patches browser
* sample resynthesis capability like the paraphrasis vst
.... a) either we create samples of different pitches through resynthesis of one sample
.... b) or we build oscillators etc to play the resynthesized sound

[Tj Shredder]

A VST that supports MPE would be interesting...

[Obsolete236871]

It's very ambitious to make a better .sfz player than Plogue. One thing I'm missing from Plogue though is the ability to route different sounds within a sample set to different outputs (especially for drum and percussion libraries)