I don’t think the option is really on the table. I think the most intense feelings against Linuxsampler were articulated here:
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I could add more… 
. (I also have liquidsfz installed because of some testing I did for clippy.) Two if you discount fluidsynth and zynsampler as sample players. Maybe more accurate to say sfz players.
What are the pros and cons for sforzando? I have installed it and could do some tests but what does it give us and what challenges do we see, e.g. I don’t see any license info.
I think it supports all sfz opcodes, so this is a very strong pro. Sfizz has many unsupported opcodes of which the most annoying are mostly about modulating parameters and parameter curves. E.g. you can use effects in sfizz, but you cannot control them.
I can’t tell about the license, I actually thought it is proprietary closed source and that it offers linux binaries I know since exactly today.
The manual from 2017 states
What is sforzando?sforzando is a free (as in beer) minimalistic SFZ 1.0 and 2.x player.
So it is not free software. Unless things have changed since then.
Hi @riban and all,
I am currently discovering ‘shotcircuit XT’ made/being developed bij the Surge team.
It is a real sampler… lots of edit functionality! It reads several libraries… AKAI Z4/Z8, audio files and… SF2 and SFZ files!
So… you can use it as just a player or you can optimize your SF2/SFZ intrument by editting… the waves… filters… envelopes etc… 
Unfortunately its only available as CLAP or VST3… (I use Carla.lv2 stereo rack to load the vst3… only an additonal 3 % CPU power)… I am sure somebody will succeed in adding a lv2 wrapper to the code so that it also creates an lv2 instrument.
I Love it!
Cheers,
Maarten
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Open for Business… or For Fun!
OEM developers and sample providers are offering a range of commercial and free sound banks dedicated to sforzando. Go check them out! And watch that space often, there’s always more to come! You are a developer and want to make a product for sforzando? Contact us!
To my current knowledge it rather “imports” very basic sfz rather than loading it. I think editing (and saving/exporting) them is currently not a milestone afaik.
Hi @hannesmenzel ,
O ja? Could you indicate what and where is a not basic SFZ so I could have a look at the import of it in shortcircuit XT?
Cheers,
maarten
I think the discussion about import was here.
These opcodes are really not much more than assigning samples to keys and having loop points.
I don’t say it wouldn’t be a great addition to Zynthian, it certainly would be huge. But not as an sfz related engine but as a sampler engine.
I totally concur 
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Hi @hannesmenzel,
I am a little bit confused now. So a SFZ instrument is very simple just some samples with their loops and assigned to keys… What can go wrong then in shortcircuit XT?
So I compared Sfiz with Sforzxando and Shortcircuit XT…
The sample sounds are identical also the velocity response is the same. The only difference is that the ADSR is at a default setting in the Shortcircuit XT, meaning the decay and sustain has te be adjusted a little bit… then the sound and playing is identical.
In Sforzando the ADSR is not adjustable but it seems as if it uses ADSR (or whatever envelope) settings from the SFZ instrument.
So… indeed… sorry to have brought up this wonderful sampler… 
indeed its is not exactly a SFZ player… but almost (and you can adjust the SFZ to your liking with filter and amplitude modulation… and more…)…
Cheers and thanks for your response 
Maarten
I was testing sforzando in the RBPi, but it’s not going to be useful for us in its current state because:
1.) It can’t run without the GUI
2.) There is no command line arguments to load a soundfont, for instance
3.) It doesn’t support jack audio at all. Only ALSA, and not very well. It generates audio but it doesn’t receive MIDI from any source.
Perhaps some of you want to lobby to get something useful. I suppose they have good reasons to release a Linux version with ARM64 support. Perhaps they are open to integrate the software in something like zynthian. It’s a debian-based ARM64 linux system, just what they are targeting with this (still Beta) release
Regards!
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I didn’t test Shortcircuit by now. I just followed the discussion about sfz import and export. I assume that if you would load some conplex scripts like Virtuosity Drum from Karoryfer it certainly wouldn’t sound like intended, because they might support sample mapping and looping, but not the full set of code for e.g. multiple sound sources, keyswitches, crossfades and many other things.
That said, it might be a great sampler engine with the possibility to have simple (!) multisamples as a starting point.
But what am I talking about? I didn’t even test is
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I deem it very unlikely that they haven’t heard of the Zynth at this point, since it is pretty much on everyone’s mouth in the Linux music world, also thanks to the well conceived and highly complementary @mr_floydst YT clips.
It’s just that those in the Debian ecosystem who aren’t yet acquainted with the Z mostly regard it as a sort of further distro for ARM64, while the Linux Intel desktop users generally dismiss the computational capabilities of the Raspi5 CPU.
I suspect that many developers simply ignore how brilliantly coded is ZynthianOS, as a custom embedded system, and how much more fast and efficient is, in comparison with the still slowish performance of desktop music apps on Raspberry OS.
Cheers 
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Excellent post and dripping in compliments . . .
Have extra soup tonight.
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With some soon-to-be-Spring added specialties, I surmise, right? Asparagus chunks? Wild strawberry sprouts?
No. mostly old rooks….
Some of them very old…
Best not to ask about the rest.
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Ouch… Rigueur meal then. Well deserved as it seems.
Hey, I tried to summarize the discussion on a dedicated wiki page.
It is not complete. Please feel free to add to it, correct my spelling and other things.
I tried to draft somewhat like a “roadmap”, and my feeling is that we need do discuss some design decisions first. My feeling is that the most controversal or difficult questions are:
- Where to store and how to distribute the package. (upstream, git, webconf, mixture of these)
- How far to edit them, especially how much to fit it to the zynthian UI
But there are hints which direction we might go:
The main question for me here is how the earthlings among us not involved in the whole UI python infrastructure are starting out. I.e. I already edited some libraries, but don’t know where to put them and how to contribute to the hybrid approach of storing the scripts and pulling the samples.
In other topics we seem to pretty much share one opinion, which are:
- sfizz as the target engine
- license file and compliance to this is mandatory
- Curating instead of collecting
- including integration via *.yml assignments
- writing short summaries of each soundfont to be displayed in the selection view (we need a data template for that, should it be included in the *.yml?
The same time, we can already try to collect for each instrument type your favorite contenders (already existing or new ones) for being added to the library.
EDIT: I also added a short summary on licenses, but I’m far from being an expert in these things. Maybe someone can review this. A question I have: Does the soundfont need to have a license file or is it enough if the license is stated in the readme or in the script? Can we add a license file if the intended license is named that way?
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It does support jack but everything else you say is valid. It also takes a long time to start up. It doesn’t have a LV2 but does have other plugin formats. I think that Sfizz remains the best option and that any shortcomings should be reported upstream and referenced here. Who knows? Maybe someone here might create a patch to fix an issue.