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Virtual Playing Orchestra is a legal minefield!
🕑 Added 2022-02-12 04:12:54 +0000 UTCIt was brought to my attention, that the popular free library of orchestral sampled instruments has some licensing issues. I've taken a good look. And I could't believe what I saw.
This is bad news, but it's necessary so we don't violate copyright of the authors of samples used by VPO.
The video covers this whole issue in detail, hopefully making it clear what's wrong and why does it matter.
Until these licensing issues an be resolved, I recommend everybody: DO NOT USE VIRTUAL PLAYING ORCHESTRA unless you really know what you're doing and can abide by all the licenses that are encumbering this library.
Comments
Sorry to bring bad news, but sounds included within many modern hardware keyboards usually come from sample libraries as well, distributed inside their internal memory. Some manufacturers make their own samples and others license them from third parties; in both cases, they have a license as well: https://usa.yamaha.com/about_yamaha/proprietary_rights_notice/
Andrey Pivovarov
Many years ago, after several years of doing tracker music using samples grabbed from other modules, I decided to go serious and learn to play real instruments. A couple of years after I could already play guitar, recorder and a clarinet, but still needed more instruments and orchestration. At first I tried commercial plugins, and put quite a lot of money into them, but several years later, after several "Internet activation" dead-end situations (and finally losing several of my old projects which were dependent on the impossible-to-activate plugins), I got interested in FOSS and Linux. Luckily, I also bought a CASIO CTK-691 keyboard (upgraded since then to CT-X5000), which could do a pretty good job at simulating orchestral instruments, so didn't need any software samples anymore. Years went on, I've found out that many soundfonts freely available on the Internet have dubious licenses (and even sound quite suspicious like they were taken from some commercial recordings), and it only strengthened my decision to continue to use only the sounds I really physically own, whether in the form of a real instrument or a hardware keyboard, and never download or buy anything virtual. So my advice is just to buy a decent physical keyboard and save yourself a headache with licenses. Luckily, physical synths are still mostly old-school: start up in a couple of seconds, work without the Internet and, most important, belong to you.
Yeah, it's very unfortunate, we've noticed the same with many popular "free" sound libraries, that's why we are very picky and exclude most of them in the FreePats collection, which is a very poor collection compared to other librearies, indeed, but at least it's all free ;)
