Hi Pierre,
Nice discussion topic
I don't know this instrument, so will have to trust those of you in France to decide whether or not it is a good organ to sample. My involvement can only come in once recordings have been made. There are significant differences between how Jo will record organs now to how he recorded the Stiehr Mockers. The Stiehr Mockers has only every third note recorded, and the samples are very short. As the original target was a SF2 file, this was wonderful. But this means that for the HW3 and the GrandOrgue version, the notes and wav files between the recorded notes have to be created by pitch changing those recorded notes. Then each note has to be looped individually, and tuned individually (as the tools available don't deal well with short notes, so we can't just write a batch file and have it all done). Jo did a recording of a couple of ranks of the Cavaille-Coll as a 'feasability' excercise, and it was a lot easier to loop and tune. My assumption is that it would take 1/4 of the work that the new Stiehr Mockers has taken to get a highly workable, worhty of release, HW3 and GrandOrgue version.
However, It is quite likely that nothing more will be done with this organ until the new HW3 and GrandOrgue versions of the Stiehr Mockers have been released. I know that my focus shifts from one project to another, and sometimes I 'take a break' from working on the Stiehr Mockers to create something else. Right now I haven't touched the retuning of the Positif for some weeks, because all my focus has been getting a updated version of GrandOrgue released (and my office work is hectic!). There are two organ consoles in the garage that are being MIDIfied, I got the Conn 650 completely stripped of the old parts this weekend, so it is ready to have the new MIDI boards soldered in during the next few weeks. We also purchased HW3 Basic edition this month, upgraded to Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10, and helped a bunch of people on the various online forums that we're part of
As to charging for a sample set... I think that once a new sample set appears, Jo needs to ask for a minimum dontation. Part of the philosophy behind the jeuxdorgues1 and jeuxdorges2 was giving virtual pipe organ sample sets to people so that they could play with the wonderful sounds of the Pipe Organ. I would hope that future sample sets would be available to all, but that the policy of a minimum donation (or volunteer work on a new sample set, or some other 'giving' to the jeuxdorges community) would be supported.
I've said enough now
Thanks Joseph for a wonderful place to share!
GrahamG