Entries from March 2010 ↓

I’ve released gst123 to the public today. Its a command line tool like ogg123 or mpg123, capable of playing MP3, Ogg, FLAC and whatever other audio files gstreamer supports. So it works well on music collections where not all files are encoded in the same format.

Since I’ve been using (and thus testing) it for quite some time now, it should just work. You can grab it here.

From a composers point of view, it would be nice to have a piece of software which models a grand piano and covers the complete range of expressions which make a piano a piano. For instance, if you hit the same note harder (with higher velocity), the sound should not only be louder, but also sound more aggressive. Also using the sustain pedal has a significant influence on the sound (and cannot be simply modelled as not releasing the notes that are already pressed. Finally, and maybe hardest to model, different notes inter act with each other (one string putting another into resonance).

So, dear lazyweb, I do know commercial products for windows that deliver high quality piano sound, either as huge sample sets, or via physical modelling. But are there comparable high quality pianos which are open source?