I'm not sure if I'll find it here, but something I was looking for, and never found, is a selection of free instrument samples (i.e one for each note), enough to make a toy keyboard.

Anyone got any recommendations?

(edit - the tag seems to be 'multisample' https://freesound.org/browse/tags/multisample/ )

I found some good sets:

https://freesound.org/people/Carlos_Vaquero/packs/9528/

https://freesound.org/people/tim.kahn/packs/2680/

This collection of free SoundFonts might be of interest :) https://www.pistonsoft.com/soundfonts.html

Thanks, that's a very nice list! Although, their license texts aren't easy to find..

What kind of toy keyboard are you making?

You can also consider Tone.js which is a synthesizer. Also, I like the sound of https://github.com/PencilCode/musical.js

Those two above will allow you to make a simple website toy piano.

If you are making a command line app, you can record the samples from GarageBand if you have a Mac.

There are other cool command line options. If you're interested, let me know.

Thanks! I did something with a raspberry pi and PyGame a few years back and I wanted to make something with an ESP32.

Check outhe FreePats Project

https://freepats.zenvoid.org/index.html

https://github.com/freepats/documentation/wiki

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't WebMidi[1] be a solution to your problem? Here is a piano example [2]

1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_MIDI_AP... 2. https://abbernie.github.io/tune/

There's no audio in MIDI - midi is like a machine readable sheet of notes.

Thanks! By toy I meant a physical thing, on an ESP32, for example.

Try https://www.pianobook.co.uk/ Tons of free sample libraries

I made this toy piano using a single sound effect, middle C. I pitch shift to get the others.

https://mobile.twitter.com/leapjosh/status/14230524867604111...

You can also use a single note sample (eg, C4) and tweak the playback frequency. This is how some keyboards do it. Also tracked music does it, simple and cheap.

You can definitely do this, but at a very large cost in sound quality.

Most instruments that you're trying to emulate have timbre that varies widely across their frequency range. A piano key on the left side of the keyboard sounds very different from a piano key on the right side recorded and pitched down.

This is why sample-based instruments are generally multisampled. It's not to avoid resampling, which is generally efficient and sounds good. It's to accommodate timbre changes.

Thanks! I played with trackers a lot in my youth! I mostly want different samples beecause I'm lazy, I'm trying to build something with an ESP32 and didn't want to put the effort into downsampling.

You can also look for "sound fonts".

"You can also look for "sound fonts""

Good suggestion. Though, searching soundfont, would be more efficient perhaps?

Past related threads:

Freesound: Collaborative database of creative-commons licensed sounds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27260780 - May 2021 (1 comment)

Freesound just reached 500K Creative Commons sounds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27232297 - May 2021 (67 comments)

Freesound: A collaborative database of Creative Commons-licensed sounds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8858076 - Jan 2015 (6 comments)

Thanks for this. Picking the right sounds for your chat application or game is important and not easy at all

For me, it was one of those things that I was clearly taking for granted until I had to do it myself. My first thought? "We need a sound guy"

"sound guy" is always the most underrated role, yet they can be more specialized than doctors. there's a group that specializes in recording cars. they'll place mics all over a car to get the perfect recordings. ask those guys to mic up a person for a quick interview, and they'll become so offended at your request and refuse. some people speicialize in music instruments and within intstruments you get people that specialize in drums, horns, etc. dialog people are all over in their skills too (booth, on-set, wireless, boom, etc).

Now, getting into SFX, folley, and other stuff gets just as crazy too. Some people record actual sounds, some bang out noises on synths (meant in a polite term of endearment), etc.

of course, just like in any industry, some just show up long enough to collect a pay check and and fiddle with knobs while baked.

My freesound account is 12 years old! And the website is exactly the same as it was when I registered (or so I recall). Incredible resource for bedroom producers and programmers alike.

I used this site quite a lot just yesterday, and plan on donating sometime soon. It is hard to overstate how much value I put on this website.