Recommended Sound Libraries and Where to Get Them...

[GMaq]

Hi

I thought I'd open a thread for recommendations for sound libraries (ie Soundfonts, GIG Files, SFZ, Hydrogen Kits, ZynAdd/Yoshimi patches etc.etc.) either free or commercial and links to them. Please make sure the free libraries you recommend are legal to download and share (no warez or torrent site stuff!) and also indicate if they are free or commercial and if commercial how much they cost. If you can also give at least a brief description of what you like about your recommendation or what real instrument you think it emulates well to help users choose that would be appreciated!

[mx44]

Mellotron Samples

http://www.leisureland.us/audio/MellotronSamples/MellotronSamples.htm

[varpa]

Salamander Grand Piano
  http://freepats.zenvoid.org/Piano/  => only has version2.
 
  You can upgrade to version3 with these links:
  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16547648/sgp44.1khz_V2toV3.tar.bz2
  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16547648/sgp48khz_V2toV3.tar.bz2
  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16547648/sgpOgg_V2toV3.tar.bz2

Learjet Rhodes piano SF2
  http://learjeff.net/sf/sf.html

Sonatina Synphonic Orchestra - full orchestra of SFZ files.

  Original version is at: http://sso.mattiaswestlund.net/ but this
  site may vanish soon due to lack of funds.  However, the OpenOctave
  people have made a linuxized version (mainly changing some file
  names) which you can get here:

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/openoctave/files/libraries/sonatina1.tar.bz2/download

  OOM's instructions are here: https://github.com/ccherrett/oom/wiki/Installing-OOM

o Some nice guitar gig files here:
  http://www.live-styler.de/FS_Giga/FS_mirror.html

o Open source drum kit
  http://realmusicmedia.net/osdrumkit/

o Impulse Response files (for IR lv2 plugin)
http://www.samplicity.com/bricasti-m7-impulse-responses/

[sunboy]

www.dskmusic.com has some very nice VSTis

[Piklik]

I was impressed by the possibilities of Reverberate of LiquidSonics = abilities to tune spaces with many parameters and the quality is there!  Then i contacted them and Matt (LiquidSonics) spent time to make it to work with my environment and Festige (thanks) allow vst working! Then now it works on Mixbus!

http://www.liquidsonics.com/home.htm

[varpa]

This site has gigafiles of lots of different guitars (a superset of the live-styler webpage I listed previously):
http://www.flamestudios.org/

[Piklik]

Free!

Mats Helgesson : the Maestro Concert Grand

"...the Maestro Concert Grand v2 is a big giga bank using 792 stereo samples of a concert piano, a Yamaha CF3, recorded with two Neumann KM84 microphones, disposed in X/Y, with 5 velocity layers, and weighs 932 MB ! The piano alone, without release samples, weighs 887 Mb and 440 samples. The release samples are 352 and weigh 45 MB. You can play with or without them."

"...But you must have a sampler that can read and play the gigasampler format to use it, like Halion, Kontakt, VSampler, or Gigastudio of course... The only freeware that can read this format are Synthfont and Linux Sampler, and they are not easy to use."

Download: http://sonimusicae.free.fr/matshelgesson-maestro-en.html

[varpa]

There is now a Salamander drum kit in addition to the Salamander Piano both of which are available from: http://rytmenpinne.posterous.com/    I would also note there are important bugs fixes which have been made to linuxsampler to get proper playback of SFZ files (which these are), so for best results you should recomple libgig, linuxsampler, and qsampler from SVN.

[hsnlv]

Check out Digital Sound Factory as well:
www.digitalsoundfactory.com/

The guy was the sound designer for a lot of famous hardware (most notably E-MU) and throws decent sales once a quarter it seems.  Great usable sounds and already eq'd for easy mixing.

Cheers,

Hasan

[nikkoo]

This site has gigafiles of lots of different guitars (a superset of the live-styler webpage I listed previously):
http://www.flamestudios.org/

[arnolduis]

I'd add Saint James Orchestral soundfonts

http://www.soundchords.com/2011/03/saint-james-orchestral-soundfonts.html

[bpier]

I've put for download the excellent GM bank Crisis4 in GIG format (especially for Linuxsampler) on my blog at this address : http://www.bruynooghe.fr/post/2011/09/04/Utiliser-Linuxsampler-sur-Linux . Go to the link "http://dl.dropbox.com/u/75777164/CGM4LS-Bank1.gig". Now,  right clic on with mouse and register this bank on your HD.

You can also download the Titanic Bank GM in sf2 format always on my blog, here : http://www.bruynooghe.fr/post/2011/03/27/Ubuntu-Sudio-en-utilisant-Rosegarden-et-Qsynth

Pierre

[soppel]

I found this one: http://dashersw.github.com/pedalboard.js/

I did not try it myself, I have a turtle-speed-internet. So I don't expect it will work here.
Besides I don't think I  need it. I think guitarix and rakkarack etc are enough for me.
But I cannot decide for others so I like to share it