Polyphone

SoundFonts have been around since the dawn of PC sound cards in the early 1990s. Back then, they allowed games developers and musicians to create music from short snippets of sound (samples) that could be augmented with a few parameters to describe their amplitude over time, with perhaps some filtering, to recreate an instrument. These parameters and deviations also meant several instruments could be built from the same samples, or from different sets of the same samples, giving musicians a wide musical palette within the limited capabilities of those early PCs.

Remarkably, SoundFonts remain popular, and not just in the gaming community. For electronic musicians, SoundFonts have become the standard for cross-platform and cross-application sample-based instruments. A SoundFont can now define an instrument with multiple samples per key, split by the speed you hit a key, across a range of notes, and split across the keyboard. An extended set of parameters deal with those original envelopes, filters, effects, and MIDI control, among dozens of other values. All of which is described in the open SoundFont technical specification from 2006, which became the text-based file format for SoundFont files themselves. This self-documenting and open format has helped to create the thriving online community, which is happy to share its creations (both as samples and as instruments), with many Linux clients, including FluidSynth.

Polyphone can add envelopes, map samples by velocity or note, enable a filter, and pipe controller data to internal parameters.

But outside of text-editors, there are very few SoundFont editors to help import samples, organize them into instruments, edit their parameters, and export something you can share. This is what Polyphone does. Polyphone is a well-established Qt-based desktop application that can manage hundreds of samples used in hundreds of instruments, with clever batch import and export functionality, and an ability to access almost every feature in the SoundFont specification. Best of all, it can help graphically by showing sample waveforms and loop points, with these being used as backdrops for amplitude and modulation envelope parameters. There's also a parametric equalizer, a waveform and loop-point editor, tables for mapping samples across key and velocity ranges, modulation sources, and destinations for controllers. You can also create sounds within the application itself, with both primitive recording and editing functions for spontaneous sampling.

There are many hidden options, graphical tweaks, and shortcuts that really help when dealing with potentially hundreds of samples to edit or creating hundreds of instruments, all of which can then be exported without having to edit individual text files. This is what you need when faced with a directory of WAV files that you want to encapsulate within SoundFonts with as little fuss as possible. Polyphone does this. You don't even need to leave the application, because you can preview the sounds from within the application. This is exactly what you need when dealing with banks of samples, such as those from an orchestra or a set of drum machines. Everything can be exported as a single file or as individual instruments. Similarly, you can use Polyphone to rename individual samples within instruments as well as the instruments themselves, which is useful if you're trying something more experimental with the SoundFonts it produces, rather than sample fodder for recombination. If you ever need to do something to a SoundFont, Polyphone will be able to do it.

Project Website

https://www.polyphone-soundfonts.com

Not only does Polyphone make a great librarian for your entire SoundFont library, it's equally good at playback and even includes several high quality effects.

Flight simulator

Linux Air Combat

Back in the early days of the Commodore Amiga there were a couple of flight simulators that could finally put the potential behind 3D graphics to use. One of those was called Falcon and the other was called F/A-18 Interceptor. Falcon was published by MicroProse and took a very simulator-centric point of view. It had amazing, detailed graphics (for the time) and a complex series of controls to master. Falcon became a classic and is still highly regarded. However, Amigas of the time were too slow to update Falcon's ambitious graphics, and its smoothness was poor. Interceptor, on the other hand, was published by Intellisoft and took the opposite approach. Its graphics were simplistic but effective, as were its flight model and complexity. The end result was a super-smooth 3D flight and combat simulator, which was fast and a lot of fun to play. This is what Linux Air Combat is to the more traditional and complex FlightGear.

Linux Air Combat also looks a little simplistic, but that means it's also particularly smooth and playable, just like F/A-18 Interceptor. It even looks a little like Interceptor with added cloud textures and Gouraud shading over the three-dimensional landscape. This means Linux Air Combat will even run on a Raspberry Pi, and a new build has been created specifically to run on Valve's Steam Deck. The game itself is a 3D-flight simulator loosely based around the aircraft and scenarios of World War II. This includes weapons, radar facilities, heads-up-display, and accurate flight performance according to your payload. There are four tutorial missions to get you started, and a huge variety of multi-axis controllers can be used to accurately control your aircraft with 45 mappable functions. You can even play with a friend on the same computer or with more friends online. It's a lot of fun to play, and a lot easier to get into than its substantial feature list might imply.

Project Website

https://askmisterwizard.com/2019/LinuxAirCombat/LinuxAirCombat.htm

One of the latest updates to Linux Air Combat is a build optimized specifically for the Steam Deck.