How to massage .XI and .SF2 instruments to AIFF/WAV with looppoints

These are handy utilities for SF2/XI instrument inspection/conversion and what not more. The tools might be buggy, but serve as a good startingpoint, as I didn't find any other simple sourcecode which does this.

Author

Coder of Salvation (Leon van Kammen / BUGMENOTinfo@leon.vankammen.eu (remove BUGMENOT)

Usage

$ ./xi2raw 
Usage: xi2raw <infile.xi> <outfile.raw>

$ ./loopdump 
Usage: loopdump <file.wav>

$ ./loopinject 
Usage: loopinject <infile.wav|aiff> <loopstart> <loopend> <outfile.wav|aiff>

$ ./raw2wav 
Usage: raw2wavloop <rawfile> <samplerate> <channels> <outfile.wav>

$ ./sf2toraw 
Usage: sf2toraw <sf2file> <outdir>

$ ./sf2write 
Usage: sf2write <file.sf2> <file.wav> <index> <samplerate> <lokey> <hikey>  [loopstart] [loopstop]

Note: index starts with 0, define -1 for loopstart/loopstop to disable looping

$ ./instr2raw 
    ./instr2raw instr2raw            # <file.xi/file.sf2> <outdir>      <-- converts an .xi or .sf2 file to .raw & .wav
    ./instr2raw rawdir2wav           # <dir-with-raw-files> <outdir>    <-- converts .raw files to wav (with loopstart/end)
    ./instr2raw loopInject           # <file.wav/file.aiff>             <-- injects looppoints based on file.raw.txt 
    ./instr2raw dir                  # <indir> <outdir>                 <-- process all .xi and .sf2 in indir, and convert to wav/aiff

    related commands: instr2raw, loopdump, loopinject, raw2wav, sf2toraw, sf2write, xi2raw

conversion:

./sf2toraw in/bass.sf2 outdir
./xitoraw in/chord1.xi outdir

inject loopppoints:

./raw2wav out/chord1.raw out/chord1.wav
./loopinject out/chord1.wav 100 200 out/chord1-looped.wav

or to batch directories:

mkdir in out
# copy all your instrument files to directory 'in' 
./convert instr2raw foo.xi out
./convert instr2raw foo.sf2 out
./convert rawdir2wav outdir

or a whole collection at once:

mkdir outdir
./convert dir myinstrumentdir outdir

Problem

There are many looped instruments out there (.xi/.sf2), and there are many software DAW's (cubase/ableton) and hardware tools (electribe esx/old samplers) which support .wav looppoints. However, there isnt many software out there which uses these features. Also, conversion tools usually cannot be used in batch, which can be a big pita.

The purpose of this package

• convert the free legacy of public domain .xi and .sf2 instruments to newer formats
• purely noncommercial
• educational
• conversion of royalty-, license-free and/or owned instruments

How it works

The samples and loopingmetadata are extracted from the instrumentfiles, and converted to raw- and txt-files. The shellscript 'convert' easifies batchprocessing of directories.

(IMPORT)NOTE: libsndfile generally always produces 16bit PCM (little endian) output

Dependancies

• gnu compiler, make, unzip and wget
• libsndfile library
• sox library (optional, used for normalizing samples)
• libc6-dev-i386 package (on my ubuntu)

Installation

git clone http://
cd instr2raw
make all

NOTES

For more verbose output run the convert command with '--verbose' as last argument. Also, if you feel up to it, turn on the DEBUG-flag in the Makefile for crazy verboseness =]. sf2toraw and xi2raw also generate loopfiles which the shellscript convert uses for batchpurposes. But with little effort you can inject loopdata into aiff/wav-files yourself. You can just call the loopinject command manually and insert the looppoints.

Binaries

Precompiled are available (fingers crossed!) on my blog (http://leon.vankammen.eu/tech/index.html)

Limitations

• handle stereo files (mono only since my hardware supports monolooped instruments only)
• aiff generation/injection possible but convert shellscript is not finished concerning aiff output

License

GNU AGPL