I am completely new to any form of sampling (unless loading Sound Fonts into my SoundBlaster 15 years ago counts) and I have some questions.

Q1:  Is it legal to sample sounds from my old XP-60, PLG150-AN, or PLG150-VL, and use them personally?  Not for resale, but to play them on my XF.  I doubt it is, but I thought I would check just in case.

Q2:  What software is most popular software to convert sample formats? 

I am really missing the ocarina from my SR-JV80 World board and had little luck finding one for the Motif (I wasn’t thrilled with the GM one).  I did however find this free one: http://rekkerd.org/precisionsound-releases-peruvian-ocarina/ and if it’s legal to convert it to a Motif format I would like to try it out. I would like to get a copy of John Melas’ Waveform Editor, but I was waiting on my coupon from Yamaha’s Anniversary promo.  In the meantime I downloaded a demo copy of Awave Studio and tried to load the EXS format. It appeared to work, but all I got was static when I tried to play the voice in Awave, so I moved on to the SF2 format.  I was able to save each Sound Fount as a XF voice file (ocarina, gliss, legato, staccato) and I was thinking that what might be really cool if I could use the AF1 & AF2 to get the Legato, or gliss effects.

Q3: Given the above voice (standard, gliss, legato, staccato) would it be possible (and legal) to assemble them together into a single XF voice?  I would even be ok with mapping the non-standard voices (gliss, legato, staccato) to unused octaves on the keyboard.

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bstaggs

Theres no problem sampling your other keyboards, after all thats what all the other manufacturers do anyway. As long as you dont sell them, but its a grey area, always has been. if you edit the sound and sample it, thats fine to sell. Dont worry about it, the sample police wont come looking for you any day soon. :-)

Just have a quick listen to the ROM wave #1673 Bell Choir of your XF. And now to the good old Roland D50. And now back to your XF… ;)

Somewhere in the ROM there are also some samples from the Korg Wavestation, some Jupiter and Oberheim sounds and so on.

I think sampling some signature sounds of another synth should be ok. Pretty much all manufacturers also do it.

Nut the imagination is still funny: “Sampling police! Open the Door! Delete that Ocarina sample or we will shoot!” :)

interesting topic.