Customisation of Jeux pipe organ Soundfont

As a result of the uncertainty regarding the inclusion of Aeolus in MuseScore 2, I have approached John McCoy, the author of the Jeux pipe organ soundfont to ask for permission to customise Jeux for use with MuseScore.

Here is my email to him:_
Greetings John,

We have not met, but I have been very aware of your Jeux Soundfont for many years, first coming across it while I was programming backing tracks for a living in the late 90's/early 2000's - mercifully I have now been able to semi-retire and concentrate on organs and church music :)

It has certainly improved ernomously over time :)

Early in 2011, when I was considering whether I should pony up the ridiculous amount of cash required to upgrade Finale from it's geriatric Finale 2003 state, I decided to see whether the Open Source world had anything to offer instead, which was when I first came across MuseScore. As a test I decided to write a transcription of the Regina Caeli with it. By the end of that process I was hooked, and decided to keep the £400 I would have had to spend on upgrading Finale in my wallet :)

As time has progressed I have become involved with the development of the project itself, particularly with the management of instrument sound provision and development.

Pipe organs are always really badly represented in all GM soundfonts, and this is no exception in the psrt of the FluidRS soundfont which is the default to be supplied with the upcoming MuseScore 2.0.

I would, therefore, like to produce a customised version of Jeux 1.4 which organists could download to use with MuseScore 2's new multiple soundfont capablity.

If you have any objections to this, please don't hesitate to say, but if not - do I have your blessing? You will, of course, have access to the customised soundfont to incorporate into Jeux or not depending whether you would think it was useful. You would also retain your copyright on the samples used, but I would be planning to release the soundfont under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Licence.

Looking forward to hearing from you about this.

Regards
Michael Cowgill
Director of Music,
St Michael's Retford, Notts, UK

and John McCoys reply:-
Thanks for your message!

Yes, what you propose sounds very sensible. I know from past adventures that it is sometimes very difficult to convert "stops" to another format. The way the SoundFont "standards" were implemented sometimes turns out to be different from the way those standards were written, for some parameters. I have never heard any explanation of why the standards didn't match the implementation. And because the implementation protocol isn't available to the public, we have to rely on reverse engineering to estimate the algorithms that were actually used.

The other difficulty that can be anticipated is that every time I install the soundfont on a new SoundBlaster card, a few of the "stops" get corrupted -- loop points are lost! Again, I have no idea why this happens to a few samples and not to others. Finding these problems takes a lot of time!

But if the open source environment has progressed far enough, perhaps these problems have already been solved. I wish you good luck in your project!

With best regards,

John McCoy

So this has opened the way for us to customise the soundfont how we want it.

It would be helpful for anyone interesting in using this to give input on what we actually need to do to the soundfont.

If you don't already have the original you can download it here: http://www.realmac.info/download.htm I would ignore the Hammersound link - it is quicker to use the download links directly from the page. Unless of course you are looking for more sounfonts.