Hello friends,
I'm delighted to find Jeux d'Orgues and this wonderful community of accomplished musicians/programmers.
I studied music composition and African music and dance at the University of California at Berkeley aeons ago, and ever since have been looking into the opportunity of blending the rhythmic beauties of traditional African music with the tonal beauties of the European aesthetic. After thirty years of experimentation, mental probing, and gathering ideas while trying to put food on the table for my family, I've finally come to a place where I have time to delve deeply into the issue, while using up some of my 401k, and hopefully bring out some results before I'm dead.
I'm neither an organist nor a programmer. The way I came across Jeux d'Orgues was in searching for decent organ sounds for playback of my Sibelius 6 files. I had a heck of a time accomplishing this, spending all of one day trying to download free samples. When the dust settled, I dragged everything that looked like it might work, including RGC Audio's sfz soundfont player and jeuxdorgues2_vst and jeuxdorgues21, into the "VST Plug-ins" folder of Sibelius, opened up a file, and went into the "Playback Devices" pages to see what it might look like.
Juexdorgues2_vst and jeuzdorgues21 were showing up in the "Available Devices" column, along with sfz, but I couldn't get them to load and work. But interestingly, there was another presence under "Available Devices" for which I had no accounting, not remembering having ever seen or downloading it: VSTOrgel-SynthEdit. Scratching my head as to how it got there, I tried it and it loaded and worked perfectly the first time, and I was floored by the quality of the sound. This is going to sound dumb, but I actually cried a little bit, hearing my music, some of which I'd been carrying in my head for twenty years, realized for the first time on a good organ.
My devout thanks go out to Joseph and Steven for bringing this magic to my life. You are my Plato and my Mozart. Graham, you rank right up there with them, right up there with one of J.S. Bach's brothers, or cousins, or whoever the hell they were!
I'll probably be contributing to the VSTOrgel-SynthEdit conversation as we go along, and asking dumb questions.
Warm regards,
dan
scottsdale, az