Hello Ebahim, As far as I know, the SFZ format is completely seperate from the SF2 format, with Soundfont1/2 specs being developed in the mid-late 90s by E-mu/Creative for use with their wavetable soundcards, the Soundblaster series (Though, I think they always loaded into RAM on the system, as opposed to memory on the card, but I might be wrong).
The SFZ format is developed by Roland/Cakewalk and is designed, I think, for more modern streaming of large files. The interesting thing about sfz, which you mentioned is that yes, it does support compressed .ogg files as well as uncompressed .wav files (sf2 dealt with uncompressed wav files), but .ogg is lossy (like mp3). Another difference is the architecture of the two sample formats. Basically, SF2 is a monolithic file that has to be edited with an editor that can read sf2 files (sf2 also contains all wav files inside itself). While SFZ can either be monolithic OR non-monolithic (so the wav files can be kept seperate from the mapping/programming part of the file). Another advantage of the SFZ format is that the .sfz itself is just a text file, so you can open it up with any text editor and edit away! As for playback, I don't think the linuxsampler engine decompresses the ogg-vorbis files (it'd be redundant anyway, as .ogg is lossy no matter how much decompression you do) but just streams them from the disk. Hope this helps, Andrew. On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 9:01 AM, Ebrahim Mayat <ebma...@mac.com> wrote: > Hello linuxsampler-devs > > I have a question regarding the sf2 and sfz formats. IIUC, the sfz > format is just compression applied to sf2 files. If that is correct, > is the zip algorithm used for doing this or is there another > compression procedure involved ? Would this compression be lossless ? > > As for playback, would sfz files be streamed first, prior to > decompression on-the-fly or is it the other way around ? > > Many thanks, > Ebrahim > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Centralized Desktop Delivery: Dell and VMware Reference Architecture > Simplifying enterprise desktop deployment and management using > Dell EqualLogic storage and VMware View: A highly scalable, end-to-end > client virtualization framework. Read more! > http://p.sf.net/sfu/dell-eql-dev2dev > _______________________________________________ > Linuxsampler-devel mailing list > Linuxsampler-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxsampler-devel > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Centralized Desktop Delivery: Dell and VMware Reference Architecture Simplifying enterprise desktop deployment and management using Dell EqualLogic storage and VMware View: A highly scalable, end-to-end client virtualization framework. Read more! http://p.sf.net/sfu/dell-eql-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Linuxsampler-devel mailing list Linuxsampler-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxsampler-devel
