By NearTao
Tue Oct 25, 2022 1:01 am
Tutor already gave you the best advice, which is check the license... but there are a *ton* of factors to consider.
Firstly... if you're looking to make money off of your effort... make sure you know all of the licensing involved... companies can have restrictions for resampling, using their content in a product, effects that happen after some number of sales or dollars made... it can get crazy.
Second... I'd highly consider not using their company or brand names in any materials. It's one thing to call something like Akai did the "Mini D" which sounds kind of like the Moog Mini, but they are being very careful to insinuate the sound and brand, but not actually cross the line for using either for their latest product. So sure, if you sample something and you want to express in documentation what your sample chain was... almost certainly fine... but to splash logos and brands all over your product is unlikely to fly unless you have pre-existing business partnerships and legal agreements.
Third... Digital makes things kind of fuzzy... so digital sampling and resampling can get you *exact* copies of whatever a plugin or sound source produced. Omnisphere for example has legal agreements that you sign when you install that you will not sampling from it to make third party sample packs, and I get it... the you can make perfect replicas of their patches... so it makes sense. Heck, even patches that people make for the Waldorf Iridium hardware synth have this restriction frequently... fair to use for music production, but you do not have the right to make a sample pack off of them.
Fourth... A lot of older hardware had agreements about not redistributing the ROM sample sets, but they were fine to do just about anything else with. Korg Triton was something I remember this for because they did a *lot* of patches with the limited ROM set, but it was pretty fair use to sample the heck out of the effected output because it was analog and not a pure representation of the ROMs themselves which would be simple enough to rip and then share their expansions with other users who just wanted to use RAM without investing in the ROMs themselves.
Five... There's a lot of precedent for transformative work being legal... and companies tend to not go after that. By transformative, I mean taking something that exists, that you'd have to buy, and adding new functionality to it. For example, a lot of legal MPC owners have Xpand!2, and making a product that a valid owner of that plugin could run against, extract the audio content, and transform it for them into an MPC expansion... likely is fine (though again check the license agreements)... but taking the content out yourself and repackaging it... not so much.
For something like the MC101, sure sample it... for personal use, it won't be a problem... and if you want to share it, make sure you're effecting it or doing something entirely novel with it so that it's not just another Roland MC101 Kick. Especially don't just label everything exactly the same as what Roland named the patches or use Roland or MC101 in the sample names or marketing... because then you'll also be drawing a line to their brand and business. Roland doesn't want people out there making poor quality sample packs that are too quiet or suffer from digital distortion and giving their hardware a bad name when it is entirely possible that the person sampling just had no clue what they were doing.
Anyways, good luck... and the best advice is to ask a lawyer
Firstly... if you're looking to make money off of your effort... make sure you know all of the licensing involved... companies can have restrictions for resampling, using their content in a product, effects that happen after some number of sales or dollars made... it can get crazy.
Second... I'd highly consider not using their company or brand names in any materials. It's one thing to call something like Akai did the "Mini D" which sounds kind of like the Moog Mini, but they are being very careful to insinuate the sound and brand, but not actually cross the line for using either for their latest product. So sure, if you sample something and you want to express in documentation what your sample chain was... almost certainly fine... but to splash logos and brands all over your product is unlikely to fly unless you have pre-existing business partnerships and legal agreements.
Third... Digital makes things kind of fuzzy... so digital sampling and resampling can get you *exact* copies of whatever a plugin or sound source produced. Omnisphere for example has legal agreements that you sign when you install that you will not sampling from it to make third party sample packs, and I get it... the you can make perfect replicas of their patches... so it makes sense. Heck, even patches that people make for the Waldorf Iridium hardware synth have this restriction frequently... fair to use for music production, but you do not have the right to make a sample pack off of them.
Fourth... A lot of older hardware had agreements about not redistributing the ROM sample sets, but they were fine to do just about anything else with. Korg Triton was something I remember this for because they did a *lot* of patches with the limited ROM set, but it was pretty fair use to sample the heck out of the effected output because it was analog and not a pure representation of the ROMs themselves which would be simple enough to rip and then share their expansions with other users who just wanted to use RAM without investing in the ROMs themselves.
Five... There's a lot of precedent for transformative work being legal... and companies tend to not go after that. By transformative, I mean taking something that exists, that you'd have to buy, and adding new functionality to it. For example, a lot of legal MPC owners have Xpand!2, and making a product that a valid owner of that plugin could run against, extract the audio content, and transform it for them into an MPC expansion... likely is fine (though again check the license agreements)... but taking the content out yourself and repackaging it... not so much.
For something like the MC101, sure sample it... for personal use, it won't be a problem... and if you want to share it, make sure you're effecting it or doing something entirely novel with it so that it's not just another Roland MC101 Kick. Especially don't just label everything exactly the same as what Roland named the patches or use Roland or MC101 in the sample names or marketing... because then you'll also be drawing a line to their brand and business. Roland doesn't want people out there making poor quality sample packs that are too quiet or suffer from digital distortion and giving their hardware a bad name when it is entirely possible that the person sampling just had no clue what they were doing.
Anyways, good luck... and the best advice is to ask a lawyer
