SFZ soundfonts in Ardour

bluebones · January 31, 2020, 4:58pm

After some researching what I understand would be the alternatives for making this work:

Linuxsampler: requires some understanding of command line for configuring the libraries and apparently is not the most stable thing in the world. That understanding is beyond me, forever I think.

Carla: initially made use of Linuxsampler but now moved to SFzero, requires understanding of “Carla” xD one has to put the right folders in the right places I imagine. This I could give a try, but don’t know really where to start.

Sforzando: through wine one can open its standalone version and then call it up from Carla as an LV2 plugin inside Ardour. The whole wine thing I tried more than a decade ago when I first started using Linux, and it was for me as cumbersome solution as harmful to my system that I just gave up.

Sfizz: the most promising for what I can handle, has a LV2 plugin published and all: https://github.com/sfztools/sfizz/releases/tag/v0.2.0
I downloaded it and pasted the lv2 folder in my .lv2 folder, but nothing happens.

Redux from Renoise: it has a demo version that I haven’t tried yet as I would look for a more “free (as in cold refreshing beer) full working” thing.

I’d appreciate if some connoisseur could take my hand and walk me through the most hassle free way to make an SFZ soundfont work in Ardour, preferably without messing around too much with terminal, I feel comfortable with Synaptic and .deb packages

uii · January 31, 2020, 6:05pm

Take a look here:

Just download the binary and move the liquidsfz.lv2 folder to your lv2 directory.

github.com

swesterfeld/liquidsfz/blob/master/README.md

# liquidsfz

## DESCRIPTION

liquidsfz is a free and open source sampler that can load and play .sfz files. We
support JACK and LV2.

The main goal is to provide a library that is easy to integrate into other
projects. Right now the API is still changing, but in the long term goal is to
provide a library API that is stable.

 * API documentation is available here: http://space.twc.de/~stefan/liquidsfz/api-0.2.0
 * There is also a list of [currently supported SFZ opcodes](OPCODES.md)

## COMPILING

To compile liquidsfz, use the usual

    ./configure
    make

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liquidsfz

bluebones · January 31, 2020, 6:45pm

That works!! This is so hassle free that I am both ecstatic and wondering why didn’t I stumble upon it before, liquidsfz was never mentioned anywhere!

Thank you so much.

x42 · January 31, 2020, 11:25pm

Perhaps because the project is only 3 months old? Another equally young and promising sfz player is:

bluebones · February 1, 2020, 12:57am

Ok
but I assumed that googling “sfz linux…” would show me everything that exists xD

I actually listed Sfizz as an option in my first post

lordbullingdon · February 1, 2020, 1:01pm

Wow thanks for this! I also thought I had explored every available route, but had completely missed liquidSFZ.

markay · February 1, 2020, 2:56pm

I’ve had success using SFZero. https://stevefolta.github.io/SFZero/ I also tried Linuxsampler and Carla and various other combinations but SFZero just worked. Very happy so far.

Michael_Willis · February 2, 2020, 3:04am

I’m just glad that there are more options now. It used to be Linux Sampler or nothing, but that is not the case now.

alexmitchellmus · February 2, 2020, 4:19pm

You may want to try Sfizz again. There have been a few small issues with packaging AFAIK.

So redownload.

Alternatively you can build the plugin. It is quite straightforward.

system · March 1, 2020, 4:28pm

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