Web Audio and Pro Sample Libraries

Hi all,

So glad to catch up with the discussion and the discovery of the best way to implement this. 

First, what I think is most important is just the ability to use the sample libraries from Web Audio. We have pretty well everything else and now could just use some decent acoustic timbres like the Albion libraries. Like Jussi mentioned, creating a "general purpose sample library player" for Web Audio would be a great first step. Then once ready with that lets make a demo and a web page for it. From there lets approach/ invite the VST vendors to jump on board the soon to be bigger Web Audio standard.

How does this plan sound? When would we be ready to approach Spitfire to convince them to licence for the Web Audio Sample Player? That is a good approach yet installing any licensed samples a user already has is also required.

Special hello and cheers out to Chris Lilley, we once met at the SVG conference in Vancouver, back around 2004ish. That was early days and its good to see how far SVG has come now :-)

Thom


On 2013-09-28, at 1:03 PM, Jussi Kalliokoski wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 8:15 PM, Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org> wrote:
> Hello Chris,
> 
> Friday, September 27, 2013, 11:09:37 AM, you wrote:
> 
> >  If the license
> > of the VST plugin you have purchases allows the re-use of the samples
> > themselves, then it might be possible to use them in something like
> > this?
> 
> To me that is the more important question - the libraries themselves,
> not the VSTi that uses them.
> 
> If the license allows reuse, then it should be possible to use these
> libraries via WebAudio API.
> 
> At ofmlabs, we had a VST -> Web Audio bridge on our roadmap, but it would've been too big a task to undertake with such a small team. VST is a complicated case because while you might be able to get something working if you had a x86 emulator running and reverse-engineered VST API, you'd still probably only get a very small portion of VSTs out there working. Most of them unfortunately use other OS stuff as well. Even at that point, you will have a massive effort just to get sub-par performance out of a few very simple VSTs. If, like Marcus said, you would go all the way and make a proper Windows emulator such as wine, it would be a massive undertaking, and while such a thing would probably have other uses in the future as well, it's probably not worth it for this use case since even with wine or other similar options the road is bumpy. IIRC I've actually managed to get only two VSTs (and neither had UI) running on Linux, and I've been trying a lot.
> 
> Coming to what Chris just said here, I agree and I think it will be less work to write a general purpose sample library player and get licenses and for all the raw data of the pro sample libraries out there than to try to port VST to web, unfortunately... :D
> 
> Cheers,
> Jussi
>  
> --
> Best regards,
>  Chris                            mailto:chris@w3.org
> 
> 
>