[earlyriser]

Not sure if you can help me here or someone reading this.

I'm trying to find something to programatically make piano sounds (and record an mp3) based on 2 params midi note and velocity. I'm making a videogame and I need the mp3 piano notes.

I got a free piano sample library, but the sounds start not always at the same microsecond, so I think I need to produce the samples by myself.

[jstrom]

This paper produces a good result: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2007/ph210/otey2/. If you game is OK sounding synthetic, I've had good results simulating a string plucked off center, decay each harmonic proportional to the frequency, then adding reverb.

A sound font or VST plug-in with appropriate licenses may be another route, but I can't speak to how difficult that would be to work with. It's on my to-do list.

[earlyriser]

Yes this looks perfect for what I'm trying to do. Thanks!

[bartread]

Your computer’s sound card probably has a built-in MIDI library (like general MIDI) that will include a piano as an instrument.

You could use a sequencer (like the one built in to Reaper, which is free) to sequence the notes you need using your sound card as the MIDI device.

You can then export your track as a WAV file and chop it up into individual notes using Audacity. You can then export each individual note as a separate MP3, and load them into your game.

Note that I’m using the word “soundcard” very loosely here: in many cases sound hardware is onboard nowadays. The point is your computer will have sounds you need built in.

You could also take one piano note sample and simply play it at different pitches, but the issue here is it will only sound good within a smallish range of notes - maybe an octave maximum.

Whereas your computer’s sound hardware is likely to have a piano as a wave table instrument that uses multiple or many samples or fragments of samples for each note and will sound better, though possibly still a bit synthetic.

[epcoa]

> Your computer’s sound card probably has a built-in MIDI library (like general MIDI) that will include a piano as an instrument.

> Note that I’m using the word “soundcard” very loosely here: in many cases sound hardware is onboard nowadays.

Mainstream computers haven't included "soundcards" (integrated onboard or otherwise) with any kind of built-in hardware synthesis (wavetable or FM) for nearly 30 years. What you have for hardware is mostly just a dumb digital to analog converter with some mixing features and possibly some basic canned DSP/codec functions.

> The point is your computer will have sounds you need built in.

> Whereas your computer’s sound hardware is likely to have a piano as a wave table instrument

They're going to be on the hard drive as files and synthesis is entirely in software, from which you have numerous options, including what comes with the OS. MacOS and Windows come with basic MIDI soundfont synthesizers, and on Linux you typically end up using something like fluidsynth or timidity tied to JACK/ALSA.

Hardware wave table synthesis as a usual thing is long gone (AC'97 is nearly 30 years old).

I don't think there is a straightforward way to portably configure and sequence MIDI and loopback the OS builtin synths if for some reason you don't want the audio going out the default sound device (yes, it is possible, key here is straightforward to configure programatically). What is relatively straightforward is using fluidsynth with a suitable soundfont though. Depending on what you're trying to accomplish you run a soft-synth entirely in the browser.

> You can then export your track as a WAV file and chop it up into individual notes using Audacity.

There are tons of freely available SF2 soundfonts, some with wide instrument coverage, some dedicated to single instruments with multiple layers, some very high quality (just google soundfonts). Poorly redigitizing and recreating one from the OS builtin soft-synth sounds like a waste of time.

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/web_0_0x2e_1

[squircle]

If your game is web based, toneJS may work for developing a prototype. Using basic wave forms and messing with various filters can produce piano like tones.

[darepublic]

Can you edit the sound files with ffmpeg to get rid of any empty space before the sound effect?

[earlyriser]

Yes, I could do that, but I'm not happy also with the quality of the samples and I need to produce more velocities.