This is a public service announcement, since I suspect that many here will not be aware of this development.
David Hilowitz (0) recently "ported" (1) his new sample library playback engine Decent Sampler to Linux. It is available as a Linux VST3 plugin and as a standalone application (2) David's work was substantially inspired by the work in the Pianobook community (3), where people build often-complex sample libraries originally to "save" real pianos but increasingly covering new territory (such as the Winter Voices project (4)).
I am a little disappointed that David chose to define a new sampler library format rather than use SFZ, given the developments with sfizz over the last several months. However, both DecentSampler and SFZ are text formats, and there are gratis implementations for them both. In theory, DS -> SFZ conversion could be automated, though the other way around may be more problematic.
Yesterday I downloaded 36 Decent Sampler libraries from the Pianobook website, and although they are not all quite as awesome as I had hoped for, some of them are amazing and all of them make a valuable addition to the sample library situation for Linux audio/music workflows. There are also some gratis and some non-gratis libraries for Decent Sampler on the Decent Sampler website.
It would be lovely if Decent Sampler was libre as well as gratis, and I hope we see quality SFZ libraries either gratis or reasonably priced, because that format offers some features missing from Decent Sampler. But for now, I personally consider this a wonderful step forward for Linux-based musicians.
(1) I put ported in quotes because I believe that DS is implemented using JUCE, and so this mostly just involved changing the build flags :)
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