Roland SD-90 [Touhou MIDI synth] sample ripping "illegal"? by nobody1089 at 7:23 AM EST on December 10, 2017
Some people in the Touhou music community state that ripping samples from the SD-90 (MIDI synth heavily used in Touhou music) to create a soundfont is "illegal".
I suspect they're just gatekeeping to create entry barriers, to stop people who haven't paid $200 for expensive hardware, from producing high-quality music. (They bash the available Touhou soundfonts, it's shit quality (probably true), and illegal (no clue))
Is it actually illegal to rip samples and build instruments from the SD-90? They're highly configurable; you could disable reverb/chorus, disable frequency filtering, rip the samples, and analyze the filter by comparing the unfiltered/filtered spectrums, maybe do the same with the ADSR, etc?
Actually compiling soundfonts of any synth without permisson/credits is illegal.
They would probably take down your work if you don't credit them. I've compiled a Sound Canvas soundfont and they copyrighted me -.-'
Anyway,post it on google drive or other private uploading site/app.
by birdmanager6 at 12:06 PM EST on December 10, 2017
@Jesse_ Could you send me your soundfont? And is it for SC-88? According to your logic, I don't understand why they wouldn't take down all those SC-55 soundfonts floating around...are those actually legal?
2-Maybe they have not made it public,but FL Studio uses the SC-55,so maybe they ripped from fl studio or even from a physical keyboard.
by RebeccaSugar at 12:28 AM EST on December 15, 2017
Oy vey goyim! Why don't you pay TOP DOLLAR for short loopy samples, don't you understand this is serious business! This hurts rich folk! How DARE you not pay for something you'll only use twice. This is anuddah shoah!
LOL XD some people doesn't have money or their parents don't buy online. And it is WAAAAY too expensive and i just compiled the sounds that i could so i made an Sf2 to help those people that dreams to have an Sound Canvas! :D
by NintenComet at 6:50 PM EST on December 20, 2017
Will you get sued? Not likely. Toby Fox the creator of Undertale ripped sounfonts from Mario Paint and Star Fox but hasn't gotten into any trouble for it (and that was a major indie game). Even Koji Kondo ripped samples from his Yamaha keyboard for Super Mario World. Unless you are a big name music studio with a lot of money, you won't likely be under the radar for big companies to sue you.
While on the subject, is there a SD-90 soundfont? Because I heard that the Touhou soundfont doesn't even use those samples, so I would like to have a real Touhou soundfont.
THFont's Zunpets are probably real (some weird high-frequency wrapping artifacts match Gensokyo Millenium's spectrogram exactly). I don't know if all SD-90 samples are included, or if the key assignments or effects are even close.