Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
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So I’ve finally got round to converting the General User sf2 to an sfz. I used Polyphone to convert it and the result works if I open it in Sforzando on my Mac.
Sampleverse is different. I’ve tried importing it from iCloud - it doesn’t error but doesn’t seem to do anything after the ‘importing sfz’ dialogue has gone.
I then tried copying it into the stagelight sfz folder but that wouldn’t work either.
To clarify, when you say they need to be in a single folder, do the samples still go inside that folder in a subfolder called samples?
@MatthewAtStagelight any insights?
Each .sfz file needs to know where the samples it’s referring to are located for it to work. Since it’s working on macOS, there might be some features being used that are not supported in StageLight.
If you’re using a soundfont by S. Christian Collins he discusses and has links to legacy versions of the soundfont with fewer features which are more likely to work with all synths that support SF2 and consequently SFZ. You might want to try converting one of the legacy versions of the SF2 to SFZ to see if it works for you in StageLight.
@InfoCheck : open the sfz file in a text editor to see how the sample file locations are specified. If they use absolute paths, you may have to edit the file to use relative paths. You will then need to make sure that the samples end up in the right place relative to the sfz file.
Thanks, I checked that earlier and they are relative paths.
I’m not having the issue and the OP has already checked this issue. It would be very useful to know exactly which features of SFZ are supported in StageLight. I haven’t found this documented anywhere so I put in a ticket to their support system in hopes of getting an answer to this question as I’ve never received an answer to it on their forum.
In the meantime it can be a process of trial and error to see what works versus what doesn’t.
If StageLight does answer my SFZ specifications question, I’ll share it with people here.
The lack of a manual to answer these sorts of questions about StageLight is a significant weakness of the DAW in my opinion and experience.
I’ve just tried again but with the older 1.44 version which is supposed to be more compatible, but it’s still not working.
I did forget to mention that I’m on the latest beta. Maybe it’s something to do with that.
I did wonder if using sforzando to do the conversion might make a difference too but not sure.
I can get some SFZ files to work with Lyra in Auria but they won’t load in StageLight which means there are differences between how the two apps support SFZ files. My conclusion would be that there are some aspects of SFZ supported by Lyra in Auria that StageLight does not currently support.
I’ll try to convert some of the soundfonts in question to SFZ and see how it works out, and let you know what I find.
Thank you. Hopefully we can figure this out.
@gregsmith I converted S. Christian Collins General User v1.44 using the sforzando app on macOS. This created one “SF2_smpl.wav” file of 31mb and a bunch of folders each containing a several .sfz files.
I transferred them to my iPad and placed the first .sfz file, “000_Stereo_Grand.sfz” and the “SF2_smpl.wav” together in a folder and placed them in the correct location in the Auria Pro file structure and was able to load and play it in the Lyra Sample instrument without problems. I transferred the same two files to the appropriate location for StageLight and imported the “000_Stereo_Grand.sfz” file into an ElectroKeys instrument and had no sound.
Auria Pro supports being able to associate where you start and end a region for a particular note and StageLight did not. All of the sfz files I’ve successfully imported and used in StageLight have a sample file associated with each region in the sfz file rather than one sample for all of the regions.
Without more information from the StageLight developer as to what features of sfz they support, it’s difficult to figure out how to resolve these issues.
Hey hey. Can you share the sfz file to me so we can take a look? [email protected]
Here> @MatthewAtStagelight said:
Here’s a grand piano sfz file which refers to just one sample file for each region.
When I converted it with Polyphone, it kept all the samples as separate wavs. I tried to import the cello sfz. I notice there’s an attack sample for several notes so presumably there’s 2 samples assigned to each note. Perhaps this is why it isn’t working?
I heard back from StageLight and it only supports SFZ 1 specifications and the Sforzando software used to convert the SF2 Files uses the SFZ 2.0 specification which is why it’s not working. I’ll have to see if there’s some other way to convert to SFZ 1 for StageLight or if I can modify the SFZ files themselves so they’ll work.
I just checked Polyphone and Sforzando and both only seem to offer the sfz v2 format.
I’m tempted to just get bismark bs-16i and be done but I’ve heard it’s unstable.
The other angle I’m pursuing is converting to exs24 for use in audiolayer but that seems even less likely to work out
@gregsmith I installed Polyphone on macOS, loaded in the GeneralUser GS softsynth version 1.44 SF2 file, exported it as SFZ, put the folder in the SFZ location in StageLight, and was able to load the Cello into the ElectroComposer instrument and it played as expected. 😛
How strange! Do the other instruments work? The cello does sound a bit like the default electrocomposer patch
Could you send me the sfz please so I can compare it with mine?
What options did you have ticked for the export in Polyphone?
I’ve tried several instruments and they’ve all worked. When i exported the file out of Polyphone v 2.0.0 on macOS as an sfz, you have the option to select which instruments you want to include. I exported all of them using the default settings.
Here I’ve exported some of the GS String instruments into a zip file consisting of a folder GS Strings v1 which contains .sfz files and a samples folder.
Thanks so much for this, it’s working for me too!
Spoke too soon. Whilst it plays, the samples seem to be assigned to the wrong notes. Is this happening for you as well?
There are several ways you could address this issue.
I looked at the cello instrument samples created by Polyphone and they were consistently one octave higher than the sample file name indicated (e.g. Cello-A#1.wav was analyzed to be A#2 by AudioLayer). When you look at the root notes in the SFZ file for the cello, the root note is correct for the ranges despite the sample file names being one octave too low. This means both Polyphone and AudioLayer both agree what note each of the cello samples correspond to.
Even if you should run across an SFZ conversion that is consistently off by an octave, it can be easily corrected with MIDI but clearly far from ideal.
Given the many links in the SFZ conversion chain, verifying note output accuracy may end up being a less than straight forward task. With respect to the cello conversion, I don’t think there were any problems. You could certainly load the samples for any sfz you suspect is off in AudioLayer to see what the root notes for the samples are and verify this is correct in the sfz file.
I’ve given up and imported to audiolayer instead. See here: https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/27726/audiolayer-by-virsyn-the-mobile-sampling-solution-for-ios#latest
Yes, eliminating the need for conversions is a much better option. My ideal setup would be AudioLayer supporting the full sfz spec and just using that on iOS. Going back and forth between iOS and macOS plus needing to worry about which sample player format a particular app uses would be eliminated plus I could centralize my sample instruments in AudioLayer which uses disk streaming which frees up resources other apps can use.
Agreed. Audiolayer is great and sfz would make it basically perfect. I like the idea of being able to use the instruments in other daws too which of course isn’t an option with sampleverse.