The LinuxSampler Project
about | |
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The ProjectThe LinuxSampler proect was founded / established / formed with the goal to produce a free, open source pure software audio sampler with professional grade features, comparable to both hardware and commercial Windows/Mac software samplers and to introduce new features not yet available by any other sampler in the world. The Engine
LinuxSampler was designed very modular, especially
(and in contrast to other samplers) it was decoupled from any user
interface. LinuxSampler itself usually runs as own process in the
background of the computer and usually does not show up anything on
the screen, or at most it can be launched to show status
informations and debug messages in a console window: The Face(s)
Obviously you need some way to control the sampler. That's where a
2nd application comes into game, which we call a
sampler frontend application. A frontend is (usually) a
graphical application, visible on the screen, providing the user
a set of e.g. menus, buttons, sliders, dials, etc. to allow the
user to control the sampler in a convenient way. It merely sends
the user requests to the sampler engine (LinuxSampler) and in turn
shows the engine's status informations on the screen. A frontend
does not perform any signal processing tasks, so you can see it as
a "face" of the sampler.
It's completely up to you which frontend to use. You could even use both parallel at the same time for the same sampler engine instance, really! ;-) The FormatIt is planned to support all common sampler formats in LinuxSampler, but at the moment we chose to concentrate on the Gigasampler format, because when we started this project, the Gigasampler format was (in our opinion) the most popular and "best" sampler format in regards of quality and power, especially for the synthesis of natural instruments like pianos, brass and bowed instruments. But we already made good advance in implementing this format, so we are optimistic to start with adding other formats soon. Beside that we also planned to design our own, sophisticated sampler format to introduce a more powerful and more flexible sampler format compared to any sampler format currently available in the world. Be encouraged to share your ideas about such a new format with us! The Editor
gigedit allows you to edit and create instruments
for the Gigasampler format, which can be used with LinuxSampler
as well as with Tascam's Gigastudio. Following our line of
modularity we also made the instrument editors independent
applications. Because let's face it: every sampler format is
different, so in our opinion it is better to honor the specific
features of one format with its own instrument editor application
instead of trying to fiddle everything into one single bloated
application. So gigedit is our first editor, dedicated to the .gig
format: The Technical InterfaceAs the components of the sampler are independent applications, there must be a way to let the applications communicate with each other. For this LinuxSampler provides a native C++ API as well as a network interface using an ASCII based protocol which we call "LSCP" for controlling the sampler engine and managing sampler sessions. Our frontends support that network interface, which also allwos control the sampler engine with the GUI frontend(s) remotely from another computer, probably even running a completely different Operating System. The Community
All applications are under active development. However we all work
on this project for fun in our spare time. There are still so many
things to do and our hands are limited. So don't hesitate on
participating to the project! You don't necessarily need to be a
skilled programmer to help the project. Testing the applications,
reporting bugs, writing
documentation, providing artwork, themes for frontends, etc. helps
us and all users a lot! Simply subscribe to our
mailing list
and we'll of course take you by the hand in case you want to
participate with active source code development. Don't be afraid!
You have your own ideas and concepts for making the sampler better?
Great, share them with us! |