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I'm trying to get some (individual) piano note sounds (4 octaves worth), in .aif format, for an iPhone app. My mac has a MIDI connection to a keyboard, and I can get the notes via Garage band and iTunes, but that is a lot of mucking around. Is there an easier way?

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There are loads of free sampled pianos on the web. The University of Iowa had free piano samples already in AIFF format, but their site seems to be unavailable at the moment.

A lot of the other free sampled pianos are in SF2 format, meaning you would have to find a free utility to extract the WAVs, and convert them to AIFF, which may be more laborious than you want.

Update: Years ago I started writing a utility in C# that could extract the WAVs from SF2 files (the code to parse SF2 is still available in NAudio). However, I abandoned it because someone else created a good freeware one called sfZed, which should do what you want assuming you have found a piano soundfont you like.

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For conversion I can recommend SoX.. It's a command line utility, and it can allow you to make a batch change of format for all files.. sox.sourceforge.net – notthetup Apr 25 '11 at 13:34
@ntt. Thanks heaps for that. I've checked out the SF2 format site. My "Archive Utility" couldn't open the resulting .zips, but command line unzip worked. Unfortunately, I can't read .sf2 files, and it seems that sox only works with .sf, so stumped for now. – iPadDeveloper2011 Apr 26 '11 at 2:48
It helps to know that I'm (apparently) looking for a "piano soundfont". I wasn't familiar with that term. There are plenty of links to "free piano soundfont" around, but haven't been able to find one that works for me yet. – iPadDeveloper2011 Apr 26 '11 at 3:22
@iPadDeveloper2011 - I've included a link to a utility that can extract WAV from SF2. It doesn't have to be SF2, it's just that it is one of the most commonly used formats for free sets of piano samples. – Mark Heath Apr 26 '11 at 5:59
I downloaded sfZed, but it was no use to me as I'm on a mac. – iPadDeveloper2011 Apr 26 '11 at 8:18

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