LinuxSampler

h1blank
news about features screenshots demos download support developers faq documentation bugs instruments links credits
Bitcoins Or donate Bitcoins at: 
1Q9CK7xUhMNWryqYTZLbUTXbrjpYYtwvng
Why donate?

News History

2025-06-02 LinuxSampler 2.4.0 had been released. This is a new feature release. See the release notes for details.
2024-12-23 Web forum bb.linuxsampler.org has been closed. Please use the mailing list instead for any kind of questions and discussions. Note that you must subscribe to the mailing list for people to receive your emails. Emails of not subscribed senders are filtered out and ignored by the mailing list.
2024-03-26 linuxsampler 2.3.1 maintenance release (fixes build errors with certain C++ stdlib versions, no behaviour change to recent 2.3.0 release).
2024-02-20 libgig 4.4.1 maintenance release (fixes build errors with some compilers only, no behaviour change to recent 4.4.0 release).
2024-01-26 LinuxSampler 2.3.0 had been released. This is basically a maintenance release. See the release notes for details.
2021-10-09 Kolja Koch started work on gigcreator, a GUI application that automatically creates a GigaStudio/Gigasampler (.gig) file from a directory of .wav files as input. You find the gigcreator project on Gitlab. gigcreator was motivated by libgig's new wav2gig command line tool, with the goal to be more user friendly than wav2gig.
2021-05-09 LinuxSampler 2.2.0 had been released. There are a load of new features packed into this release. See the release notes for details.
2019-09-17 New NKSP core language features in the latest development version: Support for Real Numbers, Standard Units and Finalness ...
2019-07-27 LinuxSampler 2.1.1 had been released. This is mainly a maintenance release. See the release notes for details.
2019-03-10 The macOS Installer has been modernized e.g. using now Gtk 3 for Gigedit and Qt 5 for QSampler and a modern C++11 capable compiler. Support for ancient PowerPC Macs and 32-bit Intel Macs has been dropped for that reason. So all Mac snapshot builds starting from today onwards will require a 64-bit Intel Mac with at least macOS 10.7 or higher. If you still have one of those ancient Macs and can't find an old snapshot build on our website that still works for your old Mac, then you may write us on the mailing list.
2017-11-26 LinuxSampler 2.1.0 had been released after two years of development. Check the release notes for a detailed review of what's new with LinuxSampler and friends.
2017-07-20 You are working with MusE? Then Andrew Coughlan's lscp2idf scripts might help you to automatically extract MIDI instruments from LSCP files to the MusE sequencer's IDF format, which can be helpful for patch changes in that sequencer.
2017-03-05 Services are back online. After reviewing the recent server incident we came to the conclusion that the attack was fortunately quite limited. We rolled back the system, closed the exploited security hole and brought all services back online. In case you downloaded or updated any source files from our svn server between March 2nd and March 3rd, we recommend you to delete the entire source directory and make an entire fresh checkout from svn to avoid any issues. The svn server is now back at a clean state.
2017-03-03 Important notice: Our server had been compromised. For that reason we were forced to take most services offline for now to protect you from accessing any compromised material. We are currently investigating this incident and will update you accordingly.
2016-07-06 Web Forum and Bug Tracker are back online: As you might have noticed, our Web Forum as well as our Bug Tracker were partly unavailable for quite a while. It was possible to read them, but especially registration of new user accounts were disabled (i.e. due to numerous spam bot attacks we suffered in the past). Those issues have been resolved and so both sites are back available and should now work entirely as expected.
2016-05-04 There is some progress regarding Gigedit's integrated NKSP real-time instrument script editor. Check out the News Article ...
2015-07-18 LinuxSampler 2.0.0 had been released after six years of development! Check the release notes for a detailed review of what's new with LinuxSampler and friends.
2015-06-11 The Mac installer was broken on latest OS X 10.10 Yosemite. This had been fixed today. Get the latest snapshot for Mac with Yosemite support now.
2015-04-29 A new documentation site has been launched: http://doc.linuxsampler.org - This separate page dedicated to manuals, tutorials and other kind of articles for the LinuxSampler project, is using a new solution to write and maintain such articles with a minimum of effort. Be invited to help us writing documentation for LinuxSampler and friends! As one of the first topics, this site is now hosting an introduction to the new NKSP Real-Time Instrument Script Language. The long-term plan is to move all documentation of this project from our www server to that new site.
2015-01-18 For the Mac users out there: We finally have a convenient installer for the OS X version of LinuxSampler. This is already integrated in our automatic build system. So from now on all daily snapshot builds for Mac are automatically built with an installer. By default the installer will install all components (LinuxSampler stand-alone application, VST and Audio Unit plugin version of LinuxSampler, QSampler, Fantasia, GigEdit and command line tools. At step "Installation Type" you can however also override the default installation and select which components to install.
2014-06-19 gigedit finally included with OS X snapshots! Due to the variety of third party library dependencies it took a while, but finally "gigedit", our graphical instrument editor for Gigasampler / GigaStudio files, is now included with the automatic binary snapshots builds for Mac OS X. The automatic snapshot installers are automatically compiled by one of our servers each time a developer commits something new to our Subversion (development) server. You can use gigedit on Mac OS X as stand-alone instrument editor as well as in live-mode while running LinuxSampler. In the latter case your changes with gigedit get immediately audible while playing the instrument on the keyboard at the same time.
2011-08-25 Added SFZ implementation status page. We are currently in the works to implement support for the SFZ format, which is a powerful and open sample library format, already adopted by many commercial samplers. Check our new SFZ status page to see which aspects of the format are already supported by LinuxSampler, and which ones are yet to be implemented.
2011-07-18 Download the latest OS X snapshot of the sampler! Following our ongoing sympathy for automatic snapshots, we finally provide automatic builds also for Apple OS X! As soon as some developer commits something new to our Subversion server, a new binary snapshot for OS X will automatically be available for download from our webserver within minutes. The snapshot tbz2 archive file contains universal binaries (PPC 32 bit, Intel 32 & 64 bit) of the stand-alone version of the sampler, VST and AU plugin version, and the graphical frontend applications QSampler and Fantasia. Only our graphical instrument editor gigedit is not yet part of the snapshots, it might follow at a later point. Please read the README file in the tbz2 archive file for instructions how to install everything on your Mac.
2011-06-05 From now on, our source code is managed by a Subversion server. We converted our existing CVS repository for the new Subversion server, so the complete history from the beginning of this project is also available in this new Subversion repository. Our old CVS server, along with its web frontend is still available, however is now in read only mode, so no changes can be commited to CVS anymore. On the downloads page you can find instructions how to download ("checkout") source code from our Subversion server.
2011-06-05 After a huge down time of almost one month, we decided to move to new, more reliable servers. Thanks to the University of Heilbronn which kindly hosted our servers for 8 years. We started to move the most important services to a commercial server host, which will be financed by your donations. Sorry for this long absence and thank you for your support!
2011-02-05 Download the latest Windows snapshot of the sampler! Since we have to confess that we are a bit lazy about putting out official releases, and since the latest official release of the sampler for Windows is quite old, we decided to establish automatic builts of the sampler and all other software components for Windows. As soon as some developer commits something new to the CVS server for any of the project's software components, a new snapshot binary for Windows will automatically built and be available for download within few minutes. Sorry for neglecting you Windows users out there for so long!
2011-01-23 In case you are working a lot on Native Instruments Kontakt instrument files, or if you are just interested in the .nki file format, you might have a look at nkitool. It is a simple console application which allows to export and import the human readable XML file from and to Native Instruments Kontakt .nki instrument articulation files. It can be very handy to speedup or even automate the process of creating and editing .nki instrument files.
2010-10-01 LinuxSampler is featured in the october special issue of the "Computer Music" magazine. It is available in English language in magazine stores around the UK. This special issue focused on demonstrating the "best free software" for music production on PC, Mac and mobile. LinuxSampler is covered along to four other samplers, with an introduction howto on page 57. You can read the full article here.
2010-01-07 The annual report of 2009 with our financial situation is now online. Happy new year everybody!
2009-10-16 Better a late than no announcement at all:
  • linuxsampler 1.0.0
  • Fantasia 0.9
  • qsampler 0.2.2
  • gigedit 0.2.0
  • libgig 3.3.0
  • jlscp 0.8
  • liblscp 0.5.6
This is the first release which allows the sampler to be used as audio host plugin, namely supporting the standards VST, AU, DSSI and LV2. The sampler's limits for max. voices & disk streams can now be altered at runtime by frontends, no need to recompile the sampler anymore. The Mac version now also supports CoreAudio as audio driver. The Windows version finally supports the sampler's instruments DB feature as well, however expect it still to be unstable at this point. Along to the already existing JACK audio driver, Jack MIDI support has been added in this release. The sampler allows frontends now basic MIDI control, that is to monitor incoming MIDI data on MIDI input devices and sampler channels and to send note-on and note-off MIDI events to sampler channels, which allows frontends to provide a virtual MIDI keyboard to the user. Besides these major changes there were countless bugfixes and optimizations.
2009-05-12 On the finish line to the upcoming next release of LinuxSampler and friends, a beta pre-release for the Windows platform is now available from our download server. This is the first Windows version which includes a VST plugin version of the sampler. The installer includes both, native 64 bit binaries and 32 bit binaries. The installer detects the system type and installs the appropriate binaries automatically. Please follow the ongoing discussion and development on our web forum and developers' mailing list to avoid known problems. Feedback appreciated!
2009-02-17 Cheers Mac users! LinuxSampler is finally available as AudioUnit plugin! It's still a work in progress, but you might already want to checkout the experimental AU binary package of LinuxSampler, available from our download server. As this is still an early development version, please follow the ongoing discussion and development on our web forum and developers' mailing list to avoid known problems. Feedback appreciated!
2008-02-15 We're happy to announce that the first freely available sample library is now available on our downloads server. Thanks to Mats Helgesson for giving us the permission to share his "Maestro Concert Grand v2" piano library with you. You find the download link along with the library's license informations and a demo track for prelistening on our instruments site.
2008-02-07 Added Debian Howto to the documentation site, describing how to cook Debian packages, optimized for your specific machine. Get the maximum out of your box! (The "Benchmark" chapter might be interesting for users of other systems as well)
2008-01-23 Due to popular demand we finally launched a forum for this project. The place to be and share questions, stories and the latest gossip is bb.linuxsampler.org
2008-01-03 Hey Mac Users! We hope to give you a good way to start the new year by announcing that LinuxSampler is now officially available for OS X as well! You find an installer (disk image) of the latest release of LinuxSampler and QSampler for OS X on our downloads site. Please note: gigedit is not yet available for Mac, we still need to do some work on this. Same applies to JSampler unfortunately, because the required Java version 1.6 is not officially available for Mac yet. Have a look at the OS X HOWTO for an easy start.
2007-12-26 You tried out the young Windows version of LinuxSampler and encountered problems? Check out the Trouble Shooting Section of the LinuxSampler Windows HOWTO. It still doesn't solve your problem? You can ask for help on our Mailing List . If you found bugs, please report them to our Bug Tracking System.
2007-12-07 Another strike:
  • linuxsampler 0.5.1
  • jsampler 0.8a
  • qsampler 0.2.1
  • gigedit 0.1.1
  • libgig 3.2.1
  • jlscp 0.7a
What do you expect from a sampler called LinuxSampler? Exactly: that it conquers the Windows world. This is the first official release of our applications for the Windows platform, providing a convenient all-in-one installer tagged "20071207". Supported drivers for this new system are so far: MME for MIDI and ASIO for audio. Needless to say that there still might be plenty of issues on Windows. Also note that the instruments database feature is not ported yet. Have a look at the Windows HOWTO for a smooth start. Beside this first Windows release, this is merely a bugfix release, i.e. fixing a serious crash in LinuxSampler. Retrieving instrument names from .gig files with the frontends is now much faster, so better keep that option always on in QSampler from now on. With gigedit you can now edit multiple (dimension) regions simultaniously. JSampler is finally able to retrieve instrument names of instrument files and even remotely from another machine, beside minor cosmetics like a total stream count and volume displayed in dB, as well as couple bug fixes. QSampler gave Qt3 an official funeral and is finally completely ported to Qt4. A lot of the QSampler code base has changed due to this. So you still might encounter bugs. Beside that the device management dialog received couple of bug fixes.
2007-10-23 As you might have noticed, we had issues with our linuxsampler.org DNS names in the last two days, because it was dependent to a foreign server out of our control. We just addressed this issue and finally completely moved the DNS responsibility to our own servers to avoid this happening again. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused!
2007-10-16 A new release wave of the LinuxSampler family has arrived:
  • linuxsampler 0.5.0
  • qsampler 0.1.5
  • jsampler 0.7a
  • gigedit 0.1.0
  • libgig 3.2.0
  • liblscp 0.5.5
  • jlscp 0.6a
With our new instrument editor gigedit we can finally modify existing, as well as create new Gigasampler format instruments from scratch, which are not only accepted by LinuxSampler, but also by Gigastudio. You can run gigedit as stand-alone application or "attached" to LinuxSampler. The latter case allows you to play and edit instruments at the same time, making all your modifications immediately audible, without having to reload the instruments into the sampler. You can simply edit instruments by selecting the respective sampler channel and clicking on "Edit" (in QSampler as well as in JSampler). LinuxSampler now provides a very powerful and easy MIDI program change mapping, which not only allows you to define which instrument to load on which MIDI program change number (and bank), it also allows further parameters like whether the instrument shall be pre-cached or loaded only when needed (and likewise freed when not needed). You can create arbitrary amount of effect sends for each sampler channel, each having an arbitrary MIDI controller for altering the effect send level in realtime and each one can flexible be routed to some of the sampler's audio output channels, i.e. to a dedicated one for a certain effect type (managing FX sends is yet only supported by JSampler, not by QSampler yet). The new instruments database on sampler side allows you to keep track even of largest instrument library collections. You can order them in categories and search by various criteria (you can find this feature as "Instruments Database" in JSampler, it's not yet supported by QSampler). Loading huge instruments may take a while, that's why the sampler now allows to play an instrument while loading. That way you can i.e. play and hold notes on the keyboard while loading a new instrument on the same sampler channel at the same time.
2007-10-12 libgig's home has moved to this server. It's new official home is now: http://www.linuxsampler.org/libgig/ Please update your links and bookmarks!
2007-08-10 JSampler 0.6a has been released. The Fantasia distribution is now capable of controlling all features available in LinuxSampler. See screenshot.
2007-05-24 JSampler 0.5a has been released, now with instruments database support.
2007-05-04 Qsampler 0.1.4 has been released. Almost another year has gone by.
2007-04-02 JSampler 0.4a has been released. Read the manual for installation instructions.
2007-03-24 gigedit 0.0.3 has been released, a graphical instrument editor allowing to edit existing Gigasampler format files as well as creating new ones completely from scratch. Along comes a new release of libgig (3.1.1).
2006-11-24 After a long, long development cycle LinuxSampler 0.4.0 has finally been released.
2006-11-24 libgig 3.1.0 has been released.
2006-08-07 JSampler 0.3a has been released.
  • Partially implemented a new view - Fantasia (graphic desing: Olivier Boyer). Only channel manipulation for now.
  • More new features in JS Classic - Implemented an LS Console with command autocompletion (using the Tab key), command history (using Up, Down keys), command history search (Ctrl + R), command list search (Ctrl + F), and more.
  • Implemented Orchestras (something like Bookmarks/Favorites for instruments). Drag & Drop support for instrument loading, adding an instrument to orchestra and autocompleting an instrument loading command in the LS Console.
2006-06-02 Qsampler 0.1.3 is now available. It's been a long time isn't it?
2006-04-28 libgig 3.0.0 has been released.
2006-03-16 JS Classic 0.2a has been released.
2005-12-22 Major services (CVS, downloads, Bug Tracking System) were down in the last days due to a hardware defect on one of our servers. CVS is finally up again and we are working on restoring all other services in the next days as well. We are also establishing further backup facilities to prevent this happening again. Sorry for any inconvenience!
2005-11-24 Latest CVS version of libgig now allows to create and modify Gigasampler files ( read announcement). Please let us know if you are interested in writing an instrument patch editor.
2005-10-10 JS Classic 0.1a has been released (the first distribution of the JSampler project).
2005-08-16 Due to ongoing synthesis optimizations, CVS version of LS might be broken for a while. Please use the tarball release in the meantime.
2005-07-15 LinuxSampler 0.3.3 has been released. Once again a bug fix release.
2005-06-24 LinuxSampler 0.3.2 has been released. This is more or less just a bug fix release. Just by coincidence, QSampler 0.1.2 has also been thrown out.
2005-06-12 QSampler 0.1.1 has been released, after a few bugfixes and a new logo icon.
2005-05-25 LinuxSampler 0.3.1, the first official release is finally out!
2005-05-23 After some time laying around in the backyard, QSampler 0.1.0 has been released, now with the promised Audio and MIDI device configuration interface. Enjoy!
2005-03-15 Our bug tracking system is now online and available on bugs.linuxsampler.org.
2005-03-04 QSampler, the Qt GUI front-end in the works for the LinuxSampler engine, was bumped to its now fifth primordial release (0.0.5). Still alpha code. Time to move on... to a better and complete Audio/MIDI device configuration interface, as predicted by LSCP and wrapped by liblscp.
2005-02-26 Due to a design change, current LinuxSampler CVS version is quite unstable. You might want to use the previous, stable version of LS in the meantime, which can be downloaded as source tarball . Alternatively you can also checkout the old version from CVS which was tagged as "v0_2_0".
2004-11-19 The Qt GUI front-end for the LinuxSampler engine has been updated: the 4th alpha-release of QSampler has been released.
2004-11-13 On monday (November, 15th) cvs.linuxsampler.org may be temporarily down due to maintenance work around 13:00 UTC.
2004-07-06 The third alpha-release of QSampler, the Qt GUI front-end for the LinuxSampler engine, is now publicly available.
2004-06-05 Added a screenshot to the Screenshots page, instructions how to compile the GUI are on the linked qsampler site.
2004-05-31 On wednesday (June, 2nd) cvs.linuxsampler.org will be temporarily not available from 6:00 UTC until 16:00 UTC due to construction works.
2004-05-24 The CVS repository is now browseable.
2004-05-03 We are currently in a transition stage due to the recent changes (multi channel / multi engine / multi audio output device and multi MIDI input device support) this also leads to multi problems we have to solve ;-) so meanwhile you can use the old single channel version. We created the two CVS alias tags 'singlechannel' and 'v0_1_0' which you can use to checkout the old single channel version of LinuxSampler. The CVS command line is the same except that you have to add '-r singlechannel'.
2004-03-26 CVS root path has changed! See downloads section for instructions how to checkout the latest version of LinuxSampler from CVS.
2004-03-23 Updated features section on this site, hopefully we will keep the features list in sync with the latest developments from now on.
2004-01-07 The document for the network protocol definition is now available in the downloads section. Have a look at it if you can imagine to write a frontend for LinuxSampler!
2003-11-08 Added CVS log to this site, showing the latest commits to the LinuxSampler CVS repository.
2003-11-02 Lots of news for the Linuxsampler community. We've got a new site, new domain and new code available in CVS. Check the downloads section for instructions. If you want to check it out, please keep in mind that it might contain bugs, it might crash and that it's still lacking tons of features. CVS is directed towards developers who would like to test things and add code. Users should wait for a tarball release.