Rave samples origin

Anything that doesn't fit into other topics goes here!
I just pointed out that some samples in LMMS are identical to those in Rave eJay.

Bass: roots 3 -> bassloopes/rave_bass01.ogg
Bass: clear two + off -> bassloopes/rave_bass02.ogg
Drum: hihat gold 3 -> beats/rave_hihat01.ogg
Drum: hihat smooth 4 -> beats/rave_hihat02.ogg
Drum: kick D groove 1 -> beats/rave_kick01.ogg
Drum: kick C groove 1 -> beats/rave_kick02.ogg
Drum: snare hype 1 -> beats/rave_snare01.ogg
DmitryLeon2000 wrote:
Sun Mar 10, 2019 5:20 am
some samples in LMMS are identical to those in Rave eJay.
I do not know 'rave e-jay', but it is possible that rave-e-jay has included some free samples, that also are part of LMMS' samples-pack.

Remember that Samples are for derivative usage only
Just to clarify that: Rave eJay was released on November 11, 1997, and Marc Gminder is the producer of samples.
Some Linux distributions -- such as Fedora -- have already taken action on these samples and removed them from the LMMS distribution for their platform. We too -- the upstream LMMS developers -- have a long term plan to remove all bundled samples that we're not sure of the origins of. Most samples will be removed with this effort and the `rave_*` samples will be part of that.

The commit history for these files goes back 13 years to the 2006 commit a63c20f by "Tobias Doerffel", the creator of LMMS. Unfortunately the source of these files stops there.

In defense of musikBear, we have had a similar copyright claim on a piece of art we use, specifically, the "flaming football (soccer ball)" used in our Kicker plugin. In the case of the Kicker logo, the artwork was legally obtained originally but the SVG was never saved. The SVG that we acquired was relicensed (CC0 does allow this) and the copy we had was slightly modified.
We resolved it by reverting the SVG to the original, CC0 version and adding a license file.

https://github.com/LMMS/artwork/commit/ ... 345aa2a54e
https://github.com/LMMS/artwork/commit/ ... 270bb2ef01

Anyway, I'll email Toby and see what he remembers. I can't find mention of them prior to this date, so the origin is still unknown. The fact that they contain "rave" in the file name suggests they were obtained directly from Marc Gminder's collection "Rave" collection. Some of his samples were distributed on "sample CDs". For example, the album "Marc Gminder ‎– DanceMachine - Special Edition + 400 Space-Sounds" with contained over 1,000 samples was sold in Germany, suggesting this may have been released with a liberal license.

I'll reach out to Toby and see what he remembers around this time.
Sorry for the lack of update on this topic... I emailed Toby (the original author of LMMS) and this is what he said...
Hi Tres,

unfortunately I don't remember where I took the samples from, likely extracted
from some old songs from the 90th. So you'd better drop it and/or replace it
appropriately.

Best regards

Toby
So, the next actions are (one or the other)
  • Remove (and possibly replace and remap) suspected samples -- OR --
  • Obtain some form of license for the suspected samples
A few years ago reached out to the copyright holder (company) of the samples and never received a reply.

I've sent Marc Gminder a friend request on social platform to see if he can help us obtain a license.

I've also reached out via sound-archive.com, which he seems to have founded and still lists his name as well as eJay samples on it.
Well, in an unexpected turn of events, I was able to get ahold of Marc Gminder directly and he's given us permission to keep these files. I've asked for clarification on the scope of this permission (e.g. license) so that we can inform the various Linux distributions of this.