I'm pleased to announce that new versions of the lovely Yamaha C5 Salamander Pianos originally created by Alexander Holm (creative commons) are now available from my website (for free of course).
I've done a lot of editing on Polyphone to loop the needlessly long samples at the almost inaudible tail ends (many after 15 to 20 seconds). Needless to say the software did a great job of finding the perfect loops and I cant tell the difference between the very long-sampled versions and the more compact versions. I also found a great piece of free software called Wavosaur that allowed me to reduce the latency of the samples by editing every stereo pair by removing the silent or near silent front sections.
Surprisingly also the 6 level sampled Salamander sounds every bit as good as the 15 layered one. Both versions available here
https://sites.google.com/site/soundfonts4u/
Thank you for sharing the news, you are creating great quality instruments!
For reducing the latency of the samples you can check this tool. Can you describe your experience with Wavosaur? If it does a better job I could improve Polyphone because this feature is interesting.
I did try using the inbuilt blank removal tool but it made no difference. I'm thinking there must have been a little bit of noise or something at the beginning of each sample so Polyphone saw this as legitimate sound. Wavasour was great. It keeps the stereo pairs intact and you can visually choose which part to delete.
On Wavasour do you need to determine the blank automatically or the software does it for you? Polyphone indeed removes the first part that is almost silent. As soon as a vibration comes, Polyphone considers it as the beginning of the sound. I could improve this detection and also respect the stereo as you suggest.
I don't know how good the inbuilt auto detection in Wavasaur is because I did all the editing by using the visual representation of the sounds. Sometimes there was a long slight wave visible before the sound was audible - other times these was an obvious blank before the sound. Keeping the stereo pairs intact was important and something it did well.
