Free Orchestral Sample Library

Tips & Tricks
1

Hi all,

Again I’ve been browsing the interwebs and this time I’ve come across the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra, which is a free CC-licensed orchestral sample library.

The download is ~440Mb and contains 57 instruments in SFZ format (12 brass, 3 chorus, 1 harp, 1 piano, 10 percussion, 16 strings and 14 wind instruments). These can be imported into Renoise instruments with the FileFormat tool (disclaimer: I wrote that tool).

I’ve noticed that the tool fails to correctly reference the sample files on some of the patches (which I’m currently now looking into). For these, convert the relative sample references in the SFZ file (which is a text file) as so:

samples\bass trombone\bass_trombone-* -> bass_trombone-*

This can be done with a find and replace in any text editor. The tool will then ask you for where the samples are, and you can then point to the correct folder and everything will then work.

Note that I cannot find any loop points set for any sustained instruments.

Finally, you will need to set up the instruments volume envelope after importing ot avoid abruptly terminating notes when they are released as it sounds unnatural.

Enjoy.

2

exactly what I need right now! thanks!

3

Will you post in this thread once there’s a fixed version of your tool so that one can just import directly? :)

Btw, top props for doing the tool!

4

Will do, but it may take some time, hense the work around in the first post.

5

For some reason celli-sus has loop!

interestingly, some of the high notes (for instance in Brass-Trombones Staccato) are loaded with transpose -1.

At least one has a really low note which is played reallly high

Brass Tuba Staccato tuba-stc-rr1-c#4.wav loads with -1
Flutes-sus-c4.wav had to be transposed -3 to fit in, I guess basenote
is read incorrectly.

Ok just realized that for instance Woodwinds - Flute - Staccatos has a load of samples inside it, and they’re not correctly keymapped. And flutes-stc-rr1-c4.wav is incorrectly keymapped…

Strings-Violas Pizzicato, violas-piz-rr1-c4.wav is wrongly tuned in the conversion.
Strings-Cello Solo - cello-c4 needs to be transposed -3 to work

Woodwinds - Bassoons Sustain loads with every sample +1’d

Well, I’ve been hacking at this now for 2 hours and have emerged with 44 cleared sounds and 14 ->9 sounds that just didn’t quite make it.
The xx that didn’t make it, and seem to have been converted wrong, are:
Chorus - Male
Chorus - Mixed
Strings - Celli Pizzicato
Strings - Celli Staccato
Woodwinds - Bassoon Sustain

Will try and keep working on these to make them into usable (in tune) .XRNI’s.
Okay one of the issues is that two samples are loaded on the same place, one with -1 (needs to be -4) one with 0 (needs to be -3) resulting in annoying sounds. I think all of these can be fixed apart from the Choruses which are … I don’t know what they are.

Ok, I’m going to write a bit of it, here:
Strings - Celli Staccato had sample#21 tuned to -1 (celli-stc-rr2-c4.wav). This needed to be tuned to -4.
Underneath it was another note tuned to 0, which needed to be tuned to -3.
that sample was celli-stc-rr1-c4.wav .
If this has happened during a load of sample, the highest sample will probably be a -1 as well.
and it was, sample 12 celli-stc-rr1-c5.wav was -1

Ok I’ve whittled it down to the Choruses which I must simply say, I have n oidea how to fix these ones

some might be wrong but shouldnt be

6

great, thanks!

7

thanks man, appreciate that ;)

8

thanks to mxb for the initial find and post, and thanks to esaruoho for his personal efforts!

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9

Agree, converting all these for everyone is much appreciated - thanks esaruoho!

From initial glances something wierd is going on with the SFZ importing, I’ll look into it and hopefully when it is fixed it will be more robust for the future.

10

If you can fix chorus male + chorus mixed to work in your tool, I’ll add them to the folder…
Also, if any of the others have loops, well, none of the current xrni’s have loops apart from that one which looped (surprisingly enough)
(celli-sustained)

11

I noticed back when attempting to convert the complete NS kit. (I had to bring back down the amount of samples to 255 first and then the import routine made a mess of what was left)
But if you are interested in the NS kit library, i can send you the whole kit, at least you have a good SFZ challenge to byte into.

12

Apart from c4 base note is set to b3 in ‘Male’ and ‘Mixed’ chorus I can import this with no apparent errors?

Anyway, I don’t want to derail the thread too much, but I think I’ve found where the issue arises.

I currently load the SFZ file into memory, strip any lines beginning with “//” (comments) and then convert the entire file into a simple list (splitting at end of line, “=” and " ") for parsing.

However, this creates an issue with filenames with spaces in and some magic voodoo is required to get something that ‘kind of’ works.

I cannot either take the rest of the line as the sample path as other parameters can be on the same line!

Anyway, I think the issue has been tracked down and I’ll have a think about it over the next few days.

13

Excellent. Just what I was looking for. Thanks for your hard work!

14

Ah, cool, now i got an orchestra for Dead Dog 15. Thanks! :)

15

Sweet! ^_^

16

Thanks!

17

I’ve only tested this briefly with Aria player and it worked fine, but I’ve seen other people complain about the samples being tuned wrong. Explanation for this was that SSO has faked round robin made by pitch shifting samples semitone or two and then playing them back in original tune and for some reason the playback doesn’t work correctly in many sfz players.

18

Thanks for the great instruments!

19

was there eventually a workaround and a full fileformat?

20

there is this: renoise-instruments/Sonatina at master · jbbourgoin/renoise-instruments · GitHub

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