Hello sasschary, welcome to the forum, and thanks very much for the interest in Hauptwerk, and in making sample sets.
This is the situation regarding licences and making sample sets in general:
- We don't officially provide any support for the Free Edition (although there's a Free Edition section of the forum where other Hauptwerk users might be able to offer a certain amount of help:
http://forum.hauptwerk.com/viewforum.php?f=19 . )
- It's technically possible to use the Custom Organ Design Module (CODM) in any edition, including the Free Edition. Its user guide is on the Help menu in Hauptwerk, which also covers its XML format.
- However, for actually creating audio sample files of your own (e.g. for use in a CODM ODF) you would also need the sample set creation guide from us, which we make available privately upon request, but only to licensed users, I'm afraid (since it contains confidential and proprietary information about how Hauptwerk works).
- For creating sample sets we'd strongly recommend using the CODM, rather than attempting to use the 'full ODF format', since the latter is extremely complex, and typically requires a long time to learn and perfect (and often 100+ hours of support from us). Due to the complexity and corresponding support overheads, we can only provide support for the full ODF format to the major sample set producers, I'm afraid. The CODM is specifically designed to be relatively quick and easy for technical people to learn and use, and to be sufficiently flexible for implementing the vast majority of features found on real and virtual organs (including graphical interfaces, etc.).
Thanks again and I hope that helps.
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.