Comments about:

Iowa Musical Instrument Samples, Free for Download

Altogether it's huge: 3 GB.
I only listen to the Steinway. The sound is very nice but most level is too low and not consistant.
Ex.: The A0 at ff is 13.6 dB. The C7 at pp is very low (you have to increase the level before you can hear it) and if you increase it you hear too much noise.

But nevertheless, thank you.

What a cool idea! Where else can you find a bass clarinet sample? All in all, I applaud your efforts and thanks for making it free.
Woodwinds are really difficult to use convincingly in a sampler.
In my humble opinion, to make it practical to use, the samples have to be substantially longer - in the 7 to 10 second range. (Imagine holding a note at the end of a song.) Looping could be a substitute for length, but looping this many files is waaay too much work and requires the note to be very consistant in volume. A variety of attacks would be helpful to sound convincing. Especially a short attack is needed for quicker passages.
To the kind folks at Iowa - if you have any interest in pursuing this to a deeper level and making a truely playable library, I would be willing to assist in converting the files to .wav (which would make them smaller and better for samplers and downloads) and trimming and normalizing them - as time permits, of course.
Robert
intunetown@aol.com

i have a question.. how is a .wav smaller than any sound file format being that it is raw data basically? to be honest i think that you might be confused. .wav and .aiff are the same really. both are uncompressed file formats. mac chooses to use .aiff and windows uses .wav.

changing the files to .wav will not make them smaller. it will just change the file extension and headers. lets not confuse ourselves or others with mis-guided posts.

happy recording,
editbrain

This post has been edited by editbrain: Sat 20 Mar 2004, 17:31