logoalt Hacker News

greedotoday at 12:57 AM2 repliesview on HN

I remember watching a youtube video that was kind of a Star Wars fan fic. It had a great soundtrack, that was a cross between John Williams and Michael Giacchino. The YouTuber was using some commercial program that included samples of all the orchestral instruments and you could use it to compose lush scores. I never used it since it was expensive, but I always dreamed of tools like that, like GarageBand on steroids for orchestras. Now I wonder how quickly I could vibe code something like that...


Replies

fipartoday at 1:20 AM

The code is only a (very important) part of this type of program. The samples are critical and (for the time being anyway) can't be generated by AI.

Especially important if you want orchestral instruments that sound realistic. Just think of the many ways that a single note can be played by a professional player and multiply that by the range of the instrument.

Edited to add: not orchestral instruments, and also not samples, but this gives an idea of the complexities of capturing the characteristics of an amplifier so that it can be modeled faithfully: https://neuraldsp.com/quad-cortex-updates/introducing-tina (I'm not related and I'm actually a Line6 customer, but I saw this at work in an interview by Rick Beato and though it was super interesting)

show 2 replies
falkensmaizetoday at 2:08 AM

There is a whole world of expensive virtual samples instruments that can very convincingly replicate an orchestral performance in a DAW. See Spitfire Audio, EastWest, Cinesamples, etc.