piano voices

March 8, 2006 11:11 AM

I'm looking for a collection of sound files representing each note of the piano (at least 88).

I have a soundbank file (info) which seems to contain this information, but I can't seem extract this information from the files. This will be used in an online flash application (flash doesn't support midi...).

Basically I'm looking for a collection of files named 0-88.wav or .mp3 where each file would be a note pressed at a medium velocity. I will then load these into a flash application and have them played when a note on my virtual keyboard is pressed.

posted by null terminated to technology (7 comments total)

Possibly something like Freesound? I think this was just on MeFi a couple of days ago
posted by poppo at 11:19 AM on March 8, 2006

I looked through Freesound and couldn't find a set of single notes being played.
posted by null terminated at 11:24 AM on March 8, 2006

Most soundbank or soundfont files do not contain all 88 notes. They contain a much smaller number of notes sampled at high quality and various velocities which are then pitched up or down within a small range to produce the missing notes. For example, there might be samples for C, E, G and Bb with the other notes filled in by pitch shifting.

Also, the samples are usually looped rather than having the whole decay of the note. So the sample itself may cut off suddenly, with the fade-out being done with a volume curve in software.

You may need to rethink your approach or you will end up with huge Flash app, since all the samples have to be downloaded and kept in memory to avoid a delay when a key is pressed.
posted by unSane at 11:33 AM on March 8, 2006

Might have problem with chords playing 3 sound files at the same time...
posted by wavering at 12:17 PM on March 8, 2006

If you know java you could use the java sound API to generate, then save as a .wav file the midi sounds of a piano being played.
posted by Paris Hilton at 3:04 PM on March 8, 2006

Actually, you should really just do this whole thing as a java applet.
posted by Paris Hilton at 3:05 PM on March 8, 2006

if the sound of something like a soundbank file is good enough for this app, why not just get an audio app that groks MIDI (on Linux, there's Rosegarden, on Mac there's Garageband.. not sure about Windows, but I remember Cool Edit used to have a keyboard type deal in it back in the day) and then recapture the output using software (maybe WinAmp Pro, or Audio Hijack)? you'd have to spend the time making the 88 files, though.
posted by mrg at 8:44 PM on March 8, 2006