No Budget Pianos

[j_e_f_f_g]

In addition to the 35 General MIDI patches (out of 128) covered by the No Budget Orchestra, I'm now adding the 8 Piano patches (ie, Grand Piano, Honky Tonk, Electric Grand, Clavinet, Harpsichord, Fender Rhodes, Wurlitzer Electric Piano). I've got another 40 on the way soon. Plus all the solo orchestral instruments are going to drop soon.

The Grand Piano here is Little Lizard, now further compressed in RAM. This is about 100 times smaller than the original Salamander piano, and should be quite usable even on limited computers.

I made some improvements to the installer. (Alex, download the orchestra_plugins and piano_plugins to see if this solves the resizing problem in qtractor. Also, in reaper, if the window is blank, try resizing it to see if it "wakes up" and draws).

The piano plugins are in pianos_plugins.zip. For 44KHz, the piano waves are in 2 zips -- grand_pianos44khz.zip and other_pianos44khz.zip. For 48KHz, they are in 3 zips -- part1_pianos48khz, part2_pianos48khz, and other_pianos48khz. These will unzip to a single directory named NoBudgetPianos. There is a utility install_pianos.sh you need to make executable, and run with sudo.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/nbo-plugins/files/

[Impostor]

Impressive goal you have! I know a certain person* here who'll rejoice just at the thought of 128 extra plugins!

*not me.

[Impostor]

Nowadays young people dont buy cd's anymore:

I'm young and buy cd's!

[Impostor]

Okay, then you are the only " young" person I know that is still buying cd´s.
I wonder about the reasons for buying a cd - hope it is not the sound quality.

Vinyl has outsold CD for first time in 35 years, according to figures released by the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA). Overall music sales increased by three per cent in 2022 to almost £2billion, which is the highest figure since 2003 and nearly double the level of their low point in 2013.10.01.2023

https://www.nme.com/news/music/vinyl-ou ... rs-3378006

love to the world

No no, I'm not "young", I'm young! But still old enough to know what cassette tapes are:)

I still buy cd' s because even when I buy music online I burn it onto a cd for home listening on my oldschool amplifier+cd-player+equalizer set.

[j_e_f_f_g]

Oh god. The "superiority" of vinyl records over Compact Disc is another one of these trendy urban audio myths that impressionable audiophiles tend to fall for, despite scientific studies proving otherwise. It belongs with the "192KHz sample rate is needed", "vacuum tubes are better than solid state", "gold-plated connectors make an audible difference", "analog sounds better than digital", and other such overly generalized myths.

Numerous double-blind tests have been done on all these comparisons, and every single study has shown that there is no scientific basis to these claims. Test subjects have been unable to differentiate between the sources at any rate beyond random chance.

The reason why I include both 48k and 44k is not because the former allegedly sounds better. (It doesn't.) It's because some audio hardware supports one clock rate better than the other.

[Michael Willis]

It's because some audio hardware supports one clock rate better than the other.

I never thought I would say this, but thanks Jeff for being the voice of reason. After testing my hardware, I concluded that it performs better at 48kHz than 44.1kHz, so that's what I use for all of my projects.

Also, thanks a ton for the work on these new plugins! In rapid succession we got the new NBO, NB Pianos, and @GMaq's new drum kit. It's been an exciting couple of weeks!

[j_e_f_f_g]

yes, some soundcards are working at 48 only and doin realtime sample rate conversion then.

Right. My Emu interface clocks at 48KHz. If you give it a 44KHz signal, it will interpolate it on-the-fly, and therefore it won't sound the way the signal was intended to sound.

My motherboard audio chip is the opposite. It clocks at 44KHz, and when playing back at 48KHz, it produces a really bad aliasing.

People should be aware if their sound cards play at one rate better than another. Take the same waveform, sampled at both 44
KHz and 48KHz. (No Budget Orchestra has tons of them.) If one sounds noticeably worse than the other, then your card probably clocks at either a multiple of 44KHz or 48KHz, and interpolates for the other rate. Always run your card at the rate it best supports.

I ve converted all my 44,1 samples to 48 khz because I dont want any sample rate conversion on the fly.

That's a legitimate reason to choose a particular rate.

Not a good reason would be "48Khz rate is inherently better than 44KHz rate". That's a generality that, on its face-value, isn't true. And if someone believes otherwise, he's been fooled by an audio myth.

[Kirtai]

I read somewhere that the main reason for 48kHz is that it matches up to film (24FPS) better.

If you're not doing film, use whatever your hardware supports best.

[j_e_f_f_g]

If you're not doing film

Do raboof's porno films count?

[Kirtai]

The advantages come when you're editing or processing audio.

Just listening to it doesn't really get anything from higher depths or frequencies.

[GMaq]

@artix_linux_user

An excellent fact-filled Video that explains it very well:

https://youtu.be/cIQ9IXSUzuM

[amc252]

Hello,

I finally got around to try the NoBudget Grand Piano.
I liked the old-school, no-nonsense interface.
For some reason, while it does recognize my MIDI keyboard, I wasn't able to connect it without jack.

The Lizard piano sounds good although, in my opinion, the Salamander still sounds better, even slimmed down to flac-44100Hz which is 173MB/641 samples, compared to the Lizard 371MB/371 samples, and (I think) No Budget Grand 100MB/128 samples.
The Salamander tone seems fuller, more realistic, and there's a cleaner separation between basses and trebles.

I have a couple of questions:
1) What would you say are the main advantages of NoBudget Pianos compared to playing the Lizard library itself?
2) What other grand pianos are you planning to include?

[j_e_f_f_g]

I wasn't able to connect it without jack.

You're talking about the executable version, right? There's a bug in there if you don't set it to alsa the first time you run it. I'll fix it after I finish some other more important things. For now, you can simply delete the config file named "devices" in your home directory's NoBudget folder.

advantages of NoBudget Pianos compared to playing the Lizard library itself?

Flac is good for saving space on disk. But when loaded into RAM, it needs to be uncompressed so it can be mixed with other tracks in your DAW. This means it uses up a lot more RAM than disk space. It can be several times more.

The NoBudget plugins use my own custom player which implements only those features that are needed for my set of samples. For example, there's no filter envelope because the samples are created with the desired timbre. And the volume envelope has a limited range that is enough for these waves. Because I shave off so much overhead in various places, that allows me to use a little more overhead in other places. In particular, the waves are stored on disk in a compressed 16-bit format. Then they are loaded into RAM still compressed, and I decompress each wave as it is playing back. This uses more CPU there, and I can get away with it due to such low overhead elsewhere. But this also means that, if the samples are 100K on disk, they're 100K in RAM too, If you use the NoBudget Piano plugin in a sond, and then make a second copy of the song using the sfz NoBudget piano in sfizz, you should notice the sfz load noticeably slower. It's filling a lot more ram. And if you compare loading the original sal in flac, you can go watch a movie.

other pianos planning to include?

Just the grand, honky tonk, 2 eps, clav, and harpsichord. Right now I'm using nearly 3 gig of sourceforge's server. I'm amazed they let me have this much. But it ain't gonna be limitless. I just hope I can get the last patches up.

But there's 1 grand at glen's page ( hpiano.zip). It's too mellow for me, but you may like it.

[amc252]

Yes, I'm using the executable.
I have to select input none and then connect with jack. If I select my MIDI, Grand_Piano crashes.
The volume of the piano is quite low, even if I raise the Master volume to 127
Also, If I raises the volume in the Edit window, the sound goes off completely.

As for RAM usage, my htop readings are:
Grand_Piano 9.7%
Liquidsfz+Lizard 6.6%
Liquidsfz+full Salamander 9.4%

Do you have a link to Glen's page?

[j_e_f_f_g]

RAM usage, my htop readings are:

My plugins don't do "on demand" loading. They load entirely into ram. So they never use additional RAM. Were those liquidsfz readings taken after playing the instrument?

Do you have a link to Glen's page?

D'oh!

http://www.bandshed.net/sounds/sfz

I'll finish the last patch set, and then I'll circle around to figure out what issues some of you are having.

I know artix had trouble with my first installer's bug. But it's not my fault that he can't resist installing any plugin. You could put the label "LV2" on a cluster bomb, and he'd pick it up. It's not like I put a knife to his throat, and made him install it. At least I don't think I did. But I may have been drunk. Largos, did I hold a knife to your throat? I don't remember doing that. On the other hand, it wouldn't be entirely out of character.

<Still doing merl and largos job>