Synthetic church organ, what do you think ?

[sbenno]

From it\'s author, Fons Adriaensen:
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Aeolus (under construction) will be my first attempt to arrive at a synthesised (i.e. not sampled) pipe organ sound that should be good enough to make an organist enjoy playing it. It will in fact be a soft-synth optimised for this job, with possibly hundreds of controls for each stop, to enable the user to \"voice\" his instrument. First release is planned at the 2nd LAD conference in Karlsruhe, end of April 2004.
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It\'s a free, open source organ emulation, it will be presented at the Linux Audio conference (there will probably be a church organ performer playing using high quality audio equipement).

Here you can listen to some examples (under windows to play .ogg files you need winamp)

http://users.skynet.be/solaris/linuxaudio/downloads/564-adagio.ogg (\"http://users.skynet.be/solaris/linuxaudio/downloads/564-adagio.ogg\")
http://users.skynet.be/solaris/linuxaudio/downloads/triosonata.ogg (\"http://users.skynet.be/solaris/linuxaudio/downloads/triosonata.ogg\")
http://users.skynet.be/solaris/linuxaudio/downloads/prelude-C.ogg (\"http://users.skynet.be/solaris/linuxaudio/downloads/prelude-C.ogg\")

I\'d be interested what you think about the sound quality of this synthetic organ.

The author said the sound quality will be improved further since this is only a preliminary version.

cheers,
Benno

http://www.linuxsampler.org (\"http://www.linuxsampler.org\")

[kitekrazy]

I haven\'t listened to it yet. It\'s good to see people developing music software for Linux.

[Scott_Duncan]

I\'m a substitute church organist in Ohio, USA. My first impression is that it is a good start. Honestly, at this stage of development, I still favor sampled sounds, but given the ability to tweak the stops and further development, maybe someday I\'ll judge it equal to or better than sampled sounds. Since there are some small free sampled organs being offered for Hauptwerk (which itself is not free, but only about $90 USD, Windows Platform), I think that is a better sound solution at the present time. The synthesized instrument, at this point sounds to me a little too synthesized. I think it probably sounds synthesized to me because of too much uniformity from note to note, but there are probably other factors too, which you will be in a better position to investigate than me. The musical examples you posted are great music, but I\'d like to hear some other styles played: some pieces with lots of chords (or even a good old hymn), some examples of full organ sound, some with a flute celeste sound. That would help me do a better evaluation.

I hope I\'m not sounding too negative, because I am actually quite impressed with what you have achieved. My impression is that your sound production is already on a level above some analog church instruments that are in use today. Also, there might be PC resource factors that would make your sound solution more favorable (Hauptwerk uses RAM for the samples, so it requires lots of RAM). I\'ll be interested to watch (and listen to) your progress.

Scott Duncan

[sbenno]

Scott,
thanks for the response, I\'ll forward this posting to , the author of Aeolus, Fons Adriaensen so that he can respond you here on the form (I think he is not a NS reader).
One guy of their team told me that they are analyzing sounds from each stop from real church organs and are working to improve their mathematical model in order to provide the best possible audio quality.
Aeolus advantage is that it is low on CPU usage and RAM too (since it does not use samples).

They said they will hire a organist for the Linux Audio Conference to demonstrate it live.
(and probably make an mp3 recording of the performance).

BTW: We plan to put Aeolus on this hardware organ too:
http://www.lionstracs.com/misc/messe2004organ2.jpg (\"http://www.lionstracs.com/misc/messe2004organ2.jpg\")

It\'s powered by Linux and based on almost the same design as the Lionstracs Mediastation X-76 ( http://www.lionstracs.com (\"http://www.lionstracs.com\") )
LinuxSampler will be there too (for GIG stuff, organ and other samples), plus
the goal is to run some VSTi plugins like the Native Instruments B4.
See here for a few video demos we did at Musikmesse in Frankfurt a few days ago (NI B4 played live + background jazz base in wav/mp3 format)

http://www.lionstracs.com/~demos/video/wkx1.WMV (\"http://www.lionstracs.com/~demos/video/wkx1.WMV\")
http://www.lionstracs.com/~demos/video/wkx2.WMV (\"http://www.lionstracs.com/~demos/video/wkx2.WMV\")


Anyway I\'ll keep you informed when there are new developments.

cheers,
Benno

http://www.linuxsampler.org (\"http://www.linuxsampler.org\")