# Credits and licences In Key plays a mix of **recorded instruments** and **runtime synthesis**. The recordings come from **ten** freely-licensed libraries. Every licence was read in full before anything was downloaded, and the original licence text is vendored next to the samples it covers. | Library | What it plays | Licence | | --- | --- | --- | | Splendid Grand Piano | the Steinway, most genres | Public Domain | | Salamander Grand Piano | the Yamaha C5 in CONSERVATORY | CC-BY 3.0 | | Greg Sullivan's E-Pianos | CP-80 and Wurlitzer in AFTERGLOW | CC-BY 3.0 | | J. Learman jRhodes3d | the Rhodes Mark I | CC0 | | Karoryfer "Emily" | the electric guitar in FUZZBOX | CC0 | | dsmolken double bass | the upright in LATE SET | CC0 | | VCSL | the acoustic kit | CC0 | | Sample Pi | the electronic kit in AFTERGLOW | CC0 | | MTG Solo Saxophones | the tenor saxophone in TENOR | CC-BY 4.0 | | VCSL (pitched) | marimba, glockenspiel, tubular bells, hand chimes | CC0 | | FluidR3_GM | nylon guitar, strings, winds, harp, vibes, celesta, the HOT FIVE horns and banjo | CC-BY 3.0 | ## Recorded instruments ### Splendid Grand Piano — the piano - **Instrument:** a Steinway, sampled at **four dynamics** (PP, Mp, Mf, FF). - **Licence:** Public Domain. No attribution required; given anyway. - **Source:** [SplendidGrandPiano](https://github.com/sfzinstruments/SplendidGrandPiano), OGG conversion from [danigb/samples](https://github.com/danigb/samples). - Vendored licence: [`samples/splendid/LICENSE.txt`](samples/splendid/LICENSE.txt) This replaced the FluidR3 piano, which is the single biggest change to how the app sounds. The piano is the most-used instrument in the project — five of the six genres reach for it — and it was previously one recording per note at one dynamic. Playing softly on a real piano changes the **timbre**, not just the level: a quiet note is a different sound, not a smaller one. A single-layer set can only imitate that by dulling the note with a filter, which is exactly the "underwater" quality that took several passes to get rid of. Four real dynamics remove the guess. ### Double bass, pizzicato — the upright in LATE SET - **Player/mapper:** D. Smolken. - **Licence:** [CC0 1.0](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) — public domain. No attribution required; given anyway. - **Source:** [sfzinstruments](https://github.com/sfzinstruments), OGG conversion from [danigb/samples](https://github.com/danigb/samples). - Vendored licence: [`samples/upright2/LICENSE.txt`](samples/upright2/LICENSE.txt) Three dynamics and two takes of each note. The takes matter more than they sound like they should: a walking bassline hits the same note repeatedly, and playing back a single identical recording each time is the clearest possible signal that a machine is doing it. ### FluidR3_GM — strings, violin, guitars, pick bass, vibraphone, harp, flute, celesta, electric piano, trumpet, muted trumpet, clarinet, trombone, tuba, banjo - **Author:** Frank Wen - **Licence:** [Creative Commons Attribution 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) - **Attribution is required**, and is given here and in the app's own credits panel. - Rendered to per-note MP3 by Benjamin Gleitzman ([midi-js-soundfonts](https://github.com/gleitz/midi-js-soundfonts)). That project's MIT licence covers its **tooling, not the audio** — the audio carries FluidR3's own CC-BY licence. Worth stating plainly, because it is an easy and expensive thing to misread. - Vendored licence: [`samples/fluidr3/LICENSE.txt`](samples/fluidr3/LICENSE.txt) ### VCSL — the drum kit - **Author:** Versilian Studios / Sam Gossner ([VCSL](https://github.com/sgossner/VCSL)) - **Licence:** [CC0 1.0](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) — public domain. Quoted from the project: *"you can do whatever you want with these sounds (even make commercial software), no royalties, no credit, no special terms."* - No attribution is required. It is given anyway. - Vendored licence: [`samples/vcsl/LICENSE.txt`](samples/vcsl/LICENSE.txt) Ten pieces: kick, snare, closed and open hi-hat, tom, conga, shaker, ride, crash and cross-stick — each with real velocity layers and round-robins. **Being straight about two of them.** VCSL is an orchestral library, not a drum-kit library, and it contains no ride and no crash. What is labelled `ride` here is a **stick on a suspended cymbal**, and `crash` is an **unmuted hit on the same cymbal**. The crash is essentially right — an orchestral crash and a kit crash differ more in how they are played than in what they are. The ride is a shade washier than a real one, which has a heavier bell and a drier body. Both are much closer than the synthesised versions they replaced, and they are named for the job they do rather than for what they literally are. There are also **no brushes**, here or in any free CC0 library, because a brush is a sustained swirl rather than a hit and nobody has sampled one usefully. LATE SET therefore keeps a real snare rather than shipping an imitation of one. ### Salamander Grand Piano — the Yamaha C5 in CONSERVATORY - **Author:** Alexander Holm. A Yamaha C5 taken with two AKG C414 in AB about 12cm above the strings, at **sixteen velocity layers**; six are vendored. - **Licence:** [CC-BY 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). **Attribution is required** and is given in the app footer and here. - Vendored licence: [`samples/grand/LICENSE.txt`](samples/grand/LICENSE.txt) ### Karoryfer "Emily" — the electric guitar in FUZZBOX - **Author:** D. Smolken (Karoryfer Lecolds). An Epiphone with flatwound strings, four velocity layers and three round-robins; three layers and two takes are vendored. - **Licence:** [CC0 1.0](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). - Recorded **direct, with no amplifier**, which is the reason it was chosen. The engine already has an amp — pre-gain, saturator, cabinet lowpass — so the distortion happens at play time and FUZZBOX's drive control still means something. A pre-distorted sample is frozen at whatever gain the person recording it happened to use. - Vendored licence: [`samples/emily/LICENSE.txt`](samples/emily/LICENSE.txt) ### J. Learman jRhodes3d, and Greg Sullivan's E-Pianos — AFTERGLOW's keys - A real **1977 Rhodes Mark I Stage 73** (CC0) and a **Yamaha CP-80** and **Wurlitzer EP200** (CC-BY 3.0, **attribute Greg Sullivan**). Three velocity layers each as vendored. - These three electric pianos are most of what the reference artists for this genre actually build on, and AFTERGLOW previously had none of them — it was entirely synthesised. - Vendored licences: [`samples/rhodes/`](samples/rhodes/LICENSE.txt), [`samples/cp80/`](samples/cp80/LICENSE.txt), [`samples/wurli/`](samples/wurli/LICENSE.txt) ### Sample Pi — AFTERGLOW's electronic kit - The Sonic Pi sample pack, compiled from freesound.org material. - **Licence:** [CC0 1.0](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). - Only **one-shots** are used. The pack also ships drum loops and breaks; those are deliberately unused, because a loop is a piece of music. - Vendored licence: [`samples/samplepi/LICENSE.txt`](samples/samplepi/LICENSE.txt) ### MTG Solo Saxophones — the tenor in TENOR - **Author:** the Music Technology Group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, via [freesound](https://freesound.org/people/MTG/packs/20247/); mapped to SFZ by kinwie. - **Licence:** [CC-BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). **Attribution is required** and is given in the app footer and here. - The only **fully chromatic** instrument in the project — one recording per semitone, at two dynamics. It also ships per-note tuning corrections in its SFZ, several of them 12 to 16 cents, and those are applied: that much error is inaudible on a solo note and beats audibly against a piano holding the same chord. - Vendored licence: [`samples/sax/LICENSE.txt`](samples/sax/LICENSE.txt) ### VCSL, pitched — the mallets in BELL CIRCLE - Marimba, glockenspiel, tubular bells and hand chimes, plus a gong, woodblock, triangle and finger cymbals. **CC0.** - **All four pitched sets were mapped an octave wrong on the first pass**, and none of it was audible as a bug — an octave error sounds like a real instrument playing the wrong part. `scripts/verify-pitch.mjs` caught it by decoding every note and measuring its fundamental. - Vendored licences: [`samples/marimba/`](samples/marimba/LICENSE.txt), [`samples/glock/`](samples/glock/LICENSE.txt), [`samples/tubular/`](samples/tubular/LICENSE.txt), [`samples/handchime/`](samples/handchime/LICENSE.txt) ## Deliberately rejected Three other sources were available and were **not** used: | Source | Licence | Why not | | --- | --- | --- | | MusyngKite soundfont | CC-BY-**SA** 3.0 | Share-alike is viral. It can be read as requiring the whole app under the same terms. | | FatBoy soundfont | CC-BY-**SA** 3.0 | Same. | | Tabla soundfont | none stated | No licence means no permission. | | **Mellotron archive** (33 tape instruments) | `"license": "unknown"` | Tape choirs, tape strings, tape flutes — musically the single best thing available for AFTERGLOW and WIDE OPEN, and unusable. | | **Roland TR-808** (Michael Fischer, 1994) | none | The readme calls the samples "ABSOLUTELY FREE" and contains no copyright, permission or redistribution clause anywhere in its 8,217 characters. "Free" there means price, not a grant of rights. | | LM-2 / CR-8000 / Drumtraks etc. | none | No licence file in the folder at all. | | Aliexpress erhu | CC0 | Licence is fine; the library describes itself as "a cheap erhu bought from Aliexpress and played by someone who's more of a violinist". Rejected on quality, not rights. | | FluidR3 drawbar organ | CC-BY 3.0 | Measured a dead-consistent **two octaves** below what it claims across all twenty notes. Could not tell a mapping error from a 32' drawbar, so it does not ship. | | Commercial sample libraries | proprietary EULA | Nearly all of them forbid redistributing the samples *inside* an application, which is what this does. | Rejecting the Mellotron and the 808 cost this project real quality — an 808 is the correct kick for AFTERGLOW and a tape choir is the correct pad. The replacements are a CC0 808-style kick from Sample Pi and synthesis. That is what a licence rule is for: it has to bind when it is expensive, or it is not a rule. MusyngKite is widely considered the best-sounding of those soundfonts. Choosing on quality rather than licence would have pulled a viral licence into this project — which is the entire reason the licences were read first. Freesound was also avoided as a primary source: the library is fine, but licences vary **per file**, and that is the easiest way to end up with one non-compliant file among hundreds and no record of which. ## What is not sampled **AFTERGLOW is entirely synthesised, on purpose.** Fred again.., Four Tet and Bonobo make that music out of synthesizers, so synthesis is the correct source rather than a compromise. Synthesis is also the fallback for every genre. If a sample set is missing, blocked or slow, the app still plays — just synthesised. Nothing about the app requires the samples to load. ## A note on what is sampled Only **individual notes and individual drum hits** are used. No loops, no bars of existing records. That matters legally: a sampled instrument carries one copyright (the recording), whereas a sampled piece of music carries two (the recording *and* the composition), which is where sampling disputes actually happen.