A friend of mine lent me a fantastic african instrument: a Balafon.
I took the opportunity to sample it and make a soundfont to be used in GNU/Linux with qsynth.
Balafon
To record it I used my trusty yamaha pockettrack 2G (best buy of 2011), I then cropped the single notes with mhwaveedit and put toghether the soundfont with swami.
I don’t have the latest version of swami and there are some oddities in it, but at least I’ve been able to make it into a usable soundfont (I hope).
Please feel free to use it under the term of the CC BY-SA 3.0 license ( with the following exception:
The “share alike” condition is imperative if you modify the samples themselve or create new sample libraries with this licensed product. However, produced music and other non-sample-library works can be licensed at will).
The instrument itself is gorgeous, too bad I have to gave him back soon… I only sampled one layer for each note, basically there are three octaves of a C scale from G2 to F5 (I don’t know for shure those are the actual pitches, maybe I missed an octave in positioning notes).
The whole process took me about 2 hours to complete.
Hope you enjoy it!!
Click here for the soundfont balafon.sf2
Here’s some fiddling with the soundfont, recorded again into mhwaveedit:
linuxaudiostudio 