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Comment by afandian | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if I'll find it here, but something I was looking for, and never found, is a selection of free instrument samples (i.e one for each note), enough to make a toy keyboard.

Anyone got any recommendations?

(edit - the tag seems to be 'multisample' https://freesound.org/browse/tags/multisample/ )

I found some good sets:

https://freesound.org/people/Carlos_Vaquero/packs/9528/

https://freesound.org/people/tim.kahn/packs/2680/

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This collection of free SoundFonts might be of interest :) https://www.pistonsoft.com/soundfonts.html

Thanks, that's a very nice list! Although, their license texts aren't easy to find..

What kind of toy keyboard are you making?

You can also consider Tone.js which is a synthesizer. Also, I like the sound of https://github.com/PencilCode/musical.js

Those two above will allow you to make a simple website toy piano.

If you are making a command line app, you can record the samples from GarageBand if you have a Mac.

There are other cool command line options. If you're interested, let me know.

Thanks! I did something with a raspberry pi and PyGame a few years back and I wanted to make something with an ESP32.

Check outhe FreePats Project

https://freepats.zenvoid.org/index.html

https://github.com/freepats/documentation/wiki

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't WebMidi[1] be a solution to your problem? Here is a piano example [2]

1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_MIDI_AP... 2. https://abbernie.github.io/tune/

There's no audio in MIDI - midi is like a machine readable sheet of notes.

Thanks! By toy I meant a physical thing, on an ESP32, for example.

Try https://www.pianobook.co.uk/ Tons of free sample libraries

I made this toy piano using a single sound effect, middle C. I pitch shift to get the others.

https://mobile.twitter.com/leapjosh/status/14230524867604111...

You can also use a single note sample (eg, C4) and tweak the playback frequency. This is how some keyboards do it. Also tracked music does it, simple and cheap.

Thanks! I played with trackers a lot in my youth! I mostly want different samples beecause I'm lazy, I'm trying to build something with an ESP32 and didn't want to put the effort into downsampling.

You can definitely do this, but at a very large cost in sound quality.

Most instruments that you're trying to emulate have timbre that varies widely across their frequency range. A piano key on the left side of the keyboard sounds very different from a piano key on the right side recorded and pitched down.

This is why sample-based instruments are generally multisampled. It's not to avoid resampling, which is generally efficient and sounds good. It's to accommodate timbre changes.

You can also look for "sound fonts".

"You can also look for "sound fonts""

Good suggestion. Though, searching soundfont, would be more efficient perhaps?

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