Information

The Smurf Sound Font Editor is a sound font editor for Linux and other *nix like operating systems (perhaps win32 support in the future). Its interface closely resembles Creative Lab's Vienna Soundfont Studio. Soundfont is a standard for creating instruments (also called patches) for use in composing MIDI music. This standard utilizes digital audio "samples" (recorded or generated sounds) with effects and other parameters which can be stored in files for distribution. Creating instrument sounds from audio samples, often referred to as wavetable synthesis, provides a flexible environment that can be supported in hardware (sound cards, studio equipment, etc) or software. Navigating this project: This web site and all other Smurf project services, are hosted on SourceForge. The links under the SourceForge heading will take you to the various services provided by the SourceForge system. Project Central is the SourceForge project summary page.

News

June 5, 2002: Swami 0.9.0pre1 released! If you haven't heard already, Swami is the new name for the Smurf Sound Font Editor. Along with the name change comes an entire object oriented source code re-write, tres cool "iiwusynth" software synthesizer support, real time effects, more multi-item operations, and just general kick acidness. It is still lacking some features that Smurf has (the most major being undo support) so Smurf will still be around a while longer (its on 4 Linux distros, congratulations Smurf :) So head on over to the Swami website.

November 2, 2001: Smurf 0.52.6 released. Minor bug fixes/new features: Fixed sequencer support for newest ALSA CVS (ALSA 0.9.0 versions less than 0.9.0beta6 are no longer supported), added command line sound font file open feature as per user request, and fixed AWE wavetable driver blank device file name bug. Developement on Smurf is somewhat slow going right now, I'm currently working on getting libsoundfont integrated.

September 6, 2001: Smurf 0.52.5 released. Changes include: ALSA 0.9.0beta6+ sequencer support, improved preference handling, command line switches for trouble-shooting driver crashes on Smurf startup, and updated German translation (thanks to Johannes Drechsel-Burkhard).

August 25, 2001: I'm back from my trip to Europe which was awesome. I met many people on my travels, many of them Linux audio enthusiasts too, which has given me a nice sense of being part of a larger community. If you are one of those people, hello, keep in touch, perhaps we will meet again :) I am currently working on libsoundfont, which will be a soundfont loading, editing, and sound font database like byte stream library, which Smurf will use in the future. This will enable many great things, including integration with software synthesizers like Peter Hanappe's iiwusynth. We will be corresponding on libsoundfont and Smurf<->iiwusynth connection in the weeks to come on smurf-devel.

June 29, 2001: Created a "Future Developements" web page (accessable from menu) to contain information on where Smurf is headed. Developement has been slow as of late and I won't be working on it for a while as I will be traveling in Europe between July 3 and August 22. I'll be at the Linux Audio Developer's booth at the LinuxTag. Hope to see you there!

May 28, 2001: Updated screenshots. They look much nicer now with the GTK Eazel-blue theme.

May 3, 2001: It appears that ALSA version 0.5.10b and lower have some serious problems with AWE sample caching support causing kernel oopses (Smurf segfaults). These versions also have problems with bi-directional use of the sequencer. I've updated Smurf CVS to get around some of these problems, but you won't have sample caching support unless you use ALSA 0.9.0beta3 or plain OSS with AWE driver 0.4.4. I'll release an updated package soon.

May 2, 2001: Smurf Sound Font Editor v0.52 released. Lots of code changes increasing potential of bugs :) Please let me know if you find any. New features: Improved AWE wavetable support, including sample caching and loading of entire sound fonts, ALSA CVS support, sound font tree now has icons for various item types, limited virtual sound font bank support, and better handling of piano and wavetable device.

February 6, 2001: Smurf Sound Font Editor v0.50.1a released. Oops, broke autoconf libsndfile support with last release. Got your fix here.

February 2, 2001: Smurf Sound Font Editor v0.50.1 released. Fixed bug that caused crashes when closing sound fonts. Bug fixes in Smurf ALSA driver code. Autoconf and documentation more friendly to audiofile now that a new improved version (v0.2.0) has been released. Raw sample loading is now supported with audiofile (requires v0.2.0+).

January 2, 2001: Smurf Sound Font Editor v0.50.0 released. There is now only one binary RPM distributed (ditched smurf-audiofile naming convention) and its compiled with Mandrake 7.2 using audiofile, no ALSA support, and libpng. Heres whats new: Paste items between or within sound fonts, multiple undo/redo tree system, ALSA sequencer support, a nice splash intro image, improved sound font tree right click menus, friendlier spin buttons for setting sample loop points, lower pane window switching is now faster, lots of bug fixes and a friendlier configure script to new users.

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