Welcome to the Swami Project

About

"Swami GUI screenshot" Main window of Swami for development version

The Swami Project - Sampled Waveforms And Musical Instruments - is a collection of free software for editing and sharing MIDI instruments and sounds. Swami aims to provide cross platform (Linux, Windows and Mac OSX) instrument editing and sharing software for instrument formats such as SoundFont, DLS and GigaSampler.

Sub projects

The Swami project is divided into several sub projects to allow 3rd party applications to make use of the functionality provided.

Note: Swami generally refers to the graphical interface which most users will use to edit instruments, while Swami Project refers to all the sub projects listed below.

  • Swami - Graphical instrument editing application
  • libswami - Shared library used by Swami for GUI independent functionality
  • libInstPatch - Shared library containing most of the instrument editing logic
  • CRAM - New compression format for use with hybrid audio/binary data such as instruments
  • PatchesDB - Web database software for creating shared online instrument communities

NEWS

  • Sun Aug 24 2008 - Josh Green - Over a year has passed since the last news post. Work continues on the development version of Swami, although its not quite yet completely functional. Plans are to release 2.0 at least by the end of the year. Some new screenshots were added, which show the new knobs that are part of the FluidSynth interface and some preference dialog screenshots.
  • Sun May 6 2007 - Josh Green - Revision 1 of the Cram Format Specification is now online and is linked in several formats (HTML, PDF and OpenOffice odt) on the CRAM page. New features for CRAM format version 4 include: WavPack? support, bzip support, hybrid lossy/lossless compression and encoding of multiple samples in the same block. These features aren't yet complete in the libInstPatch reference implementation, but will be soon. CRAM version 4 is not yet finalized, so there may be some changes.
  • Thu May 3 2007 - Josh Green - A batch of news today:
    • Efforts are currently underway to import free instrument content found on the Internet into the Resonance Instrument Database.
    • libInstPatch is now LGPL, meaning that commercial applications can link to it.
    • Over the weekend I added WavPack? encoding support to CRAM which is rather exciting, since it will add slightly higher compression (than with FLAC), 32 bit integer and floating point support and perhaps best of all hybrid lossy/lossless encoding. The latter feature will make it possible to encode an instrument to a much much smaller lossy version and a second correction file. This correction file can then be used to obtain the original version. The combined sizes of the files is usually only slightly larger than if the file was encoded lossless to begin with. Nice way to distribute a large instrument file as a small preview.
  • Thu Apr 26 2007 - Josh Green - PatchesDB has been checked into Subversion, marking the official public release under GPL version 2.
  • Wed Apr 25 2007 - Josh Green - Work on getting the Resonance Instrument Database up and running is underway. Its already rather usable at this point, but is still lacking some features and needs testing.
  • Wed Apr 4 2007 - Josh Green - First day of new Trac based Swami web site. This will provide for a more interactive way for users to contribute.
  • Sun Mar 25 2007 - Josh Green - The 5th Linux Audio Conference comes to an end. It was fun seeing so many familiar faces and meeting new ones too. Swami wasn't quite ready for release but I did get to show off some of the features to a couple people. Decided on using GStreamer for audio output and sample importing. Started work on a FluidSynth GStreamer plugin which could be used in applications like BuzzTard.

DOWNLOADS

The Download page provides more information on getting Swami.

DOCUMENTATION

The Documentation page contains information for both users and developers on the Swami Project software.

SourceForge

We use some SourceForge resources for our project. The Swami SourceForge project summary page is a portal to these other services (including subversion, email lists and file releases).

LICENSE

The source code for the Swami project is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

CONTRIBUTION

Swami and related projects could really use more contributors. If you are interested in helping out, then a good start would be to join the mailing list and make a suggestion of what you could offer or ask what needs doing. You could also contribute to documentation by adding/modifying this wiki or contributing patches to open tickets.

MAILING LISTS

Currently there is only one email list for all discussions related to Swami (developers and users). Pretty low traffic at the moment.

swami-devel

SWAMI TEAM

Josh Green - josh [at] resonance [dot] org - Lead developer