Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
On Wed, 20 Feb 2008, Toby Smithe wrote:I am looking for a sponsor for my package "fluid-soundfont". * Package name : fluid-soundfont Version : 3-1 Upstream Author : Frank Wen <getfrank@gmail.com> * URL : http://tsmithe.users.ubuntustudio.org/fluid-soundfont_r3.tar.gz * License : MIT Section : soundI have been burned by soundfonts before, does Frank Wen have a site or somesuch, describing how he made the soundfount, where he got the instruments, etc?
I understand your concern, Henrique. However, the question still makes me want to punch something. Do we really have to nit-pick a hundred or more sets of samples to check whether each one is DFSG-free? Can we not accept the upstream author's license so long as it remains unchallenged? Would you subject a text font to such scrutiny?
Please don't take my remarks personally, these are real questions. We've been campaigning / waiting for a suitable soundfont candidate for something like 5 years (CMIIW). FluidR3 is the obvious candidate, it is pretty ancient and I wouldn't be at all surprised if Frank Wen has not kept records of all sample sources.
I fully realise that the font has to be sufficiently free from the 'tentacles of evil' that users could edit it in Swami and use it as a basis for new distributable fonts and also use it in their compositions without fear of retribution. This font has been out in the wild for enough years, surely? OK, I know, assume nothing. So realistically, how should we approach this? What real chance is there of getting it into lenny / Hardy?
There are a couple of side issues here relating to recognition of mimetypes. Nautilus thinks that SF2 files are video/x-msvideo, causing it to wrongly assume they are some form of AVI and associate with Movie players rather than Swami / FluidSynth; and SFARK files as application/x-extension-sfArk or application/octet-stream (i.e. unknown/unsupported). I know how to deal with this as a user, it just would be good to set some reasonable defaults.
Toby, this is fantastic work. Thank you.I suggest that the package should be distributed by debian-multimedia / UbuntuStudio / 64 Studio initially to test the waters and someone sensible raise at least an ITP so that any license violations can be properly tracked using the BTS.
Please, please, please let's walk the extra mile for this package. How can I help? I'm not a DD either. Are we ever going to be able to distribute soundfonts? If not now, when?
cheers, tim