Gramophone Records

[LMan]

Thanks for the intriguing sounds, commie! I've been looking for stuff like this.

[merman]

I will indeed go nuts. The 78 noises fill a gap and there's no straightforward legal reason why I could even be pursued.

But now the subject's up I do think about the game FX samples I uploaded. Again, I'm sure they're legally safe because they're isolated sounds not lasting long enough to infringe composer copyright. And the waveforms were generated rather than reproduced, which to all intents and purposes gets around the recording copyright as far as I can see.

But what about the programming routines which made those sounds? The codes are copyrighted but I don't think there's ever been a legal case in the UK determining whether such copyright extends to the product of that code. And I certainly see no legal bar on using the likes of the SEUCK noise generator to produce samples, with the added bonus that I doubt any programmer would want to pick a fight over .5 seconds of a sound anyway. (Unless he's Bill Gates.)

An interesting point though - The Avalanches' first album exists in two forms. The original Australian release has many samples, with some tracks having dense layers of samples to form the rhythm track. When it gained a worldwide release, they could not get clearance for all the samples, hence a heavily altered/reconstructed version was created and sold.

Sampling a TIE Fighter or a lightsaber noise would get you in trouble. Twiddling a few knobs (oo-err) in the SEUCK sound generator and sampling the result wouldn't. Likewise, sampling sounds from a famous Nintendo game would get you in more trouble than sampling a Spectrum budget game.

[Commie_User]

I suppose recording from Nintendo games would be a different puddle to splash in also because so many of their big games incorporated sound samples. That could undeniably constitute pinching someone's copyrighted sound. Not to mention Nintendo's understandably hardened legal team getting miffed, on behalf of the board, for the pop musicians apparently getting unauthorisedly rich on the back of the company's labours.


And I'd also like to say thanks for all the feedback on this topic. I rarely post on here unless I've got something big and you can probably guess I'm not much of a smalltalk man.

But I plan to be back with more samples soon, suitably encouraged. Amongst others, I've got a Hammond organ, which has oddly never appeared in VST or sample form that I've ever found*, to share. So don't miss 'em!



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* However, this chap's samples sound near enough, though only using one voice:

http://www.illuminatedsounds.com/?p=635

They're in 24-bit, so I'd be quite happy to have them for my own collection too.