Re: [fluid-dev] Supported Wave/Flac format other than SF2

[Garth Hjelte]

At 01:40 PM 2/4/2015, you wrote:

>I'd like to look into it, but various links to cakewalk's specifications are 
>dead-ending on me.  It's making me wonder just how "open" the format really is.

The reason is that Cakewalk was bought by Roland last year, and recently Gibson 
bought them from Roland. They've changed things without thinking about it.

The history of SFZ is that it was developed by a person named Rene who 
lives/lived in Tierra Del Fuego. He fully intended to keep it open and 
published it with that intent. Cakewalk purchased the technology, and so far 
has NEVER attempted to make it proprietary. They did add a "v2.0" set of 
parameters but none of that was hidden. The specs for v1.0 are easily available 
and that's all we are really concerned about.

As far as how "open" SFZ is, it's open, it's just that Cakewalk never took 
steps to manage it. Others have stepped up and offered the management the 
format deserve, without having a heavy hand on it. Mostly this is the work of 
Plogue, who even wrote an EXCELLENT and FREE SFZ player called Sforzando. 
www.plogue.com

SFZ is open and will continue to be open. The text-based ability of it is easy 
and user-friendly. Anyone can figure it out, it's even easier than HTML. All it 
is essentially is key/value pairs delimited by an equal character. 

Garth Hjelte
Sampler User