Now that DigiBooster is coming, I've been thinking about getting into music composition again.
Immediately, I realized I would also need some instruments. Can anybody here point me to some source of instrument samples?
I've had a hard time in the past attempting to find instruments: They are either non-free (which surprises me, given the huge amount of free compositions out there), or come in some multi-octave sample format which is not obvious.
Some people told me that the best solution is to extract instruments from existing songs, but I'd prefer having them stand alone. Songs tend to be too similar to others, if you take their instruments. Can anyone help?

All Amiga musicians, come to MorphOS!

come in some multi-octave sample format which is not obvious.

If you mean Sound Font format, you may expect it to be supported in some 3.x version of DigiBooster. Also a good source of sounds may be just sampling a keyboard instrument. "Reusing" samples from modules usually gives no good results, as most of samples are of low quality and low sampling rate. I recommend at least 44.1 kHz sampling rate for samples.

Try searching "samples" at Mininova, it gives lots of results. Also, there are hundreds of top-quality sample-cds for sale, check out Sonart for example

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Well, I didn't know I was meaning that! The Wikipedia page about Sound Font is very interesting, and it shows that free, good quality samples do exist. So lack of instruments is no excuse!

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That would be great! It seems this Creative propietary format is a de-facto standard. There are some open source programs which have support for it, so having Sound Fonts in DigiBooster could be possible. But, as you say, in a future version.

Also, hooligan's tip for finding instruments (searching torrents with "sample") gave good results, but revealed something interesting: While searching Sound Font, I could find classic instruments, but when I searched samples, most results were about techno/dance.

If you need classical instruments, oh boy would you fall in love with this.

Shame Digibooster doesnt support VST's

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that's one of the reasons why i won't use it.

As a musician myself i switched to the evil PC years ago to produce music, and i don't feel like using anything less good than Renoise now.

Digibooster is coming too late, and i think the name "Professional" doesn't suit it at all. Nice effort though.

The problem with VST is not adding generic support. I've looked into this and there are no serious obstacles. But then most of useful plugins are closed source and are for x86 (or Mac PPC, which does not help a tiny bit). Even if a plugin is opensourced and it has a GUI, this GUI needs to be rewritten. I can build a simple VST host into DigiBooster just to say "woooo, DigiBooster supports VST", but the real usability will be very low. I prefer to have an easy to use, native plugin API, so one can port some VST opensource thing, or write own effects.

Digibooster is coming too late, and i think the name "Professional" doesn't suit it at all.

I can do nothing about "too late". I agree about the name however. I do not consider DB3 "professional" in the sense that pro musicans would be using it (I guess they are not using typical trackers at all). I will call it just "DigiBooster 3" personally and suggest it as the official name.

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*MILLIONS OF DANCING BANANAS*

Renoise was my best buy, ever

renoise made by ex-amiga ppl is it not?
best app ever btw:)
i wonder if a morphos port is possible (w/o vst ofcoz).

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The quality of art doesn't have to be proportional to the quality of the tools to build it. There are brilliant songs done with something as primitive as ProTracker, fifteen years ago. Also, I'm sure one can compose horrible songs with the brilliant Renoise.

Of course, I'd like a top quality tool. But it all comes down to the musician. Sometimes, simpler tools render better results, because they don't distract from the essence of your creation.

Sometimes, complex tools render horrible results, as we can see in nowadays computer industry: There a lots of examples of programs being absolute crap, coming out of very modern and complex programming environments. While other people, with much more limited resources, craft absolute programming masterpieces.

jcmarcos: very well said! and a limited toolset could bring out more creativity than a "press a button and voil?" solution.

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I see it quite the opposite. With good tools you have better chance producing good sounds.

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you're absolutely right but the thread talks about the tool, and so was I.


the tool is outdated and for most musicians who started through amiga trackers then evolved with the progress made in this field would feel like playing with an old toy using DB3.

It's still an impressive piece of work for what i have seen, but i took bad modern habits i guess : )

There are two factors in this equation. A music may be good or bad in two ways. The first one is the art of composition, the second one is technical quality. While advanced tools have great impact on technical quality, the dependency between artistic quality and tools used is not so obvious.

Modern PC music software is just taking advantage of x86 CPUs power, while all Amiga trackers, including DigiBooster 2, are still in 68030 era. For high quality technically wise, 68k is not enough. DigiBooster 3 will take advantage of PowerPC and will move audio quality to a higher level.

would feel like playing with an old toy using DB3

Looks like you know DigiBooster 3 better than me .

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I don't think so i'm just an arrogant producer who got used to fast x86 hardware and modern software. I share your views about the "equation" but i keep being amazed to feel unlimited while working under renoise on a quad core x86 machine. It goes really fast, i can mix as many tracks with as many vst synth as i want, i can work faster and experiment more. That's called comfort.

I'll make my best to produce a MorphOS anthem with DB3 as soon as it's released. I will certainly not use it for professional composing/mixing/mastering but it's still nice to have a decent tracker on MorphOS (i felt so disappointed by the morphos milkytracker port, polyphonic recording was broken or too slow).

by the way, will it use reggae in any way ?



[ Edited by SoundSquare on 2009/5/9 1:34 ]

i can mix as many tracks with as many vst synth as i want, i can work faster and experiment more. That's called comfort.

Sure, but you still think about DigiBooster 3 in 68030 categories. DB3 can mix its all 254 tracks much faster than realtime on Pegasos, including DSP effects. Of course it won't be faster than quadcore x86, but your words about program you haven't tried yet, are a bit too fast.

by the way, will it use reggae in any way?

Yes, MorphOS version will use Reggae for sample loading and saving at least.

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I guess "faster than realtime" is ALL the speed one would want. Or am I wrong? Would even more speed be neccesary for anything? By the way, I expect good use of Altivec in DB3.

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Great. But you say the opposite that I was expecting: I thought Reggae would be doing, precisely, the signal processing. Every demo I've seen about Reggae is about that...

Now, for a dumb question: Is DB3 able to load every song from older 68k versions?

@jcmarcos

Better speed means you can use higher quality algorithms and stack more effects. Current engine (not using Altivec yet) synthesizes 20-channel modules in 40x realtime (Peg 2), so in theory it could handle 800 channels. It is without advanced DSP however, on the other hand is not very optimized yet.

Reggae is available on MorphOS only, so I can't base DigiBooster core functionality on it. The synthesiser engine must be self-contained and portable.

DB3 is able to load DBM0 format for now (DigiBooster Pro 2.x). It will also load DIGI (DigiBooster 1.x) in the future. 100% fidelity can't be achieved however for two reasons:

1. I decided to fix some DB 2.x player bugs and design flaws.
2. DBM0 and DIGI are not compatible with each other (for example the same effect numbers have different meaning).

For most DBM0 modules the differencies are hard to notice.

Forgive me small crossposting. There is a 20 minutes movie from DigiBooster 3 presentation on PowerDev Meeting #6 (29 March 2009) and I've just added English subtitles to it, so it is much more informative now.

so what's up with digibooster?
long time no news..?

jcmarcos

Nice post.. Art can be made with ANY tool. I still keep a trusty A2000HD with 1.3 rom and a LIVE! 2000 card for lo-res cool video effects!

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Thankyou Thomas. You did actually read a comment by me from more than one year ago? Wow!

Now, some news about DigiBooster 3, pleeeee...

Nothing official, but I've taken a little break in DigiBooster3 programming. One needs a break sometimes in such a big project. I plan to resume work in the second half of June. The current work concentrates on instrument editor, which is one of the three big components of every tracker (player engine, pattern editor, instrument editor). Fast and accurate sample display engine is finished (with scrolling, zooming and all fancy stuff). Loop editor part is currently in the work. Then there is envelope editor, which in contrast to DB 2.x will be combined with sample editor, so one can see envelopes over sample. After that I will implement missing stuff in player engine (DSP echo and some minor commands like sample offset, and evenlope slide). This will make the main stuff ready, there are just lots of smaller things to add however. The editors (APC&TCP) will decide which of them must go into 3.0 release and which may be added later as updates.

BTW I invite those interested in DB3 development to look at my Twitter account (link in the signature).

[ Edited by Krashan on 2010/5/17 11:04 ]