Either as an expansion of ACE Fluid Synth or standalone.
sfizz is a portable, open source, libre SFZ player, available for Linux, Windows and macOS in several plugin formats.
What could be the benefit of making it ābuilt-inā ?
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So sfizz comes with Ardour now? Thatās great.
But yes, that is more or less what I meant by āin-builtā. Even more precisely: a sfz player in the āACEā family format would be a logical step forward.
And one plugin for both sf2 and sfz would obviously be of some benefit.
Paul, a welcoming attitude?
In many enterprises, thereās a hierarchy, so that the head doesnāt have to deal with the mundanest stuff.
Much love. 
This āenterpriseā consists of about 2.5 people. We donāt have the resources to delegate stuff, and I do not consider interacting with users to be āmundaneā.
We also donāt have the resources to add one of every possible type of plugin to Ardour, and donāt see a lot of reason to duplicate the fine work being done by 3rd party FLOSS plugin developers. For your purposes, an SFZ player may be the obvious next step; for someone else it might be a convolver, or a better reverb, or ā¦
As for my attitude, my responses on the forum and elsewhere tend to be terse. This is not meant to be unwelcoming, just a reflection of the realities of time. The more time I spend crafting warm hugs (which I would like to do) the less time I have for fixing bugs and adding features (which I would also like to do, and I would argue is of more value than overtly fuzzy replies, but YMMV).
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Indeed: time is of the essence. May your success be continued in the new year, whatever the almanac.
Paul et al. (IMO, of course) can either do an Apple walled-garden approach, which some would love and some would hate, or go with a very open approach, which would satisfy (more) the FOSS-bigots (I mean that in a good way), which have their point as well.
Although itās nice to have a hands-on CEO (for lack of a better term) with this product, I also do wish there were a flag we could set on some of these posts to say āPaul, just look awayā. Honestly, it seems that half of the beefs posted on here of late are Apple-centric, which just gives me another reason to find Mr. Cook and company less than lovable. But if Ardour didnāt have a Mac version, then jeez, people would be calling it a hate crime, yada yada. You canāt win in this world. 
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One could argue why provide a Soundfont Player which is getting quite dated and plays a proprietary format and NOT an SFZ Player which is a superior, more current and open format. If you had neither I would take your point that āwe donāt do sample players, go use an external one!ā but you do provide one and not the otherā¦ 
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I investigated this in the past when writing āACE Fluidsynthā.
When bundling a plugin, its release cycle is tied to Ardour releases. liquidsfz. sfzero, sfizz are under active development. If Ardour would ship a sfz player, users might get stuck with old versions and experience bugs that have been fixed upstream already.
As opposed to SF2, sfz is vastly more complex with different implementation supporting different subsets of it. As @GMaq mentioned it is also a rather dated format.
Then there would be additional overhead to maintain the plugin. This work is already done by plugin devs. e.g. sfizz provides installers for all major platforms and some distros package it.
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Iām nearly positive @GMaq was referring to SF2 as a dated format (active development from 1994 - 2006), compared to SFZ (c. 2005 - current).
In addition, I find the SFZ format (one human editable text file plus zero or more samples) vastly simpler and more hackable than SF2 (a ācompiledā / āopaqueā binary format).
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Yessir, I was saying SF2 is dated and proprietary not SFZā¦ Of course both have still their uses, no AVL-Drumkits without SF2 for instanceā¦ 
Oops, my bad, sorry.
So letās just say that SF2 is even more dated than SFZ
A potential solution is to extend Window->Library Downloader with a tab for plugins.
We can publish curated plugin binaries there, and occasionally update them with new versions. This provides some version-independence Ardour itself.
It could grow to a full-time job to build plugins and verify compatibility on all of Ardourās platforms, though.
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Could? Methinks you might be optimistic there;)
Seablade
Itās always a slippery slope for sure, to clarify I certainly donāt think Ardour should get into more āPluginsā (plural). The current ACE offerings and Fluidsynth Player can get new users off to a good start. On the other hand an SFZ Player would also be a nice thing to have self-contained for new Users or even people swapping sessions between Platforms. Fluidsynth covers those with existing Soundfont collections they may have used on other DAWs in years past coming from Windows or Mac but SFZ would be a pretty nice and perhaps more importantly an āopenā current sample player to have in Ardour and the Harrison productsā¦
While Iām here I think a lookahead limiter (ie just drop in the SWH one with a nice ACE UI) is a glaring omission in the ACE set but that is another topic for another timeā¦
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Thanks for chiming in m:sieur Glen. I agree. And much praise to you and yours for giving us AVL Drums.
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The ACE set of tools is one of Ardourās many strengths, I feelā¦
Or clear decisions regarding which plugins or features to include in the main base. That would humanize the effort. Kudos, anyway.
OT. Btw: The Redux Sampler (Renoise) can read/import SFZ sounds and need about 50% of cpu power as Sfizz.
And you can adjust many fine things in Redux.
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