Pipe organ sampler for creative minds

Design your console. Build your stop list. Perform.

OrganSampler plays sampled pipe organs from plain folders of WAV files - one folder per stop, its pipes as WAV files - and turns any number of such folders into an organ of your own design.

No organ definition file, no installer, no account. Load the folders, let the program propose the organ, shape it - divisions, stops, perspectives, audio routes, voicing - and save it as a configuration. Free software under the GNU GPL v3 for Windows, macOS and Linux.

Download What is inside

Version 0.8.125 · Windows 10/11 x64 · macOS 11+ (Intel: 10.11+) · Linux x64 (glibc 2.38+) · one portable executable

Three metal organ pipes on a dark background

Every pipe a recording. Every stop a folder. The organ is yours.

Your own organ, from any sourcesstops of different producers in one console, duplicated as transmissions and extensions, two configurations merged into one

Up to 300 000 voices - or a 2009 laptopmeasured on your organ by the program itself; a two-core machine plays a village organ

Any number of sound cardsevery perspective and division on its own device and channels

Plain WAV foldersno format of its own, no encryption: the samples you buy or download, as they are; a Hauptwerk definition opens too

Inside the program

From a folder of samples to an organ.

Four windows do the work: the console, the Stop List where the organ is built, the Divisions dialog with the audio routes, and the Configuration Editor with the manual one click away from every option.

The main window: top bar, combination pistons, the global sound sliders with the polyphony display and the stop grids of the divisions. — The console: one column per division, the stops as buttons, couplers and tremulants in the headers, pistons and the crescendo above.Full size ↗

Build the organ yourself - from any sources

Load a folder tree of samples; the program recognises the stops, their footages and pitches from the files, the microphone perspectives from the folder prefixes, and proposes the divisions. Mix stops of different sample folders and producers into one console, move them between divisions, duplicate them as transmissions and extensions (a 16' from an 8' by transposition, a mutation from a principal), merge stops, merge a second configuration into the organ, arrange the grid. A Hauptwerk organ definition opens as a configuration as well. This is what sets OrganSampler apart.

Every route on any sound card

Every perspective of every division is an audio route with its own device, buffer size and output channels - ASIO and Windows Audio side by side, several interfaces at once, an aggregated device for the rest. One IR reverb per route, mixed in parallel on the render workers. A measurement button finds the polyphony your computer reaches with this very organ.

Voice every pipe

Per-key volume, pitch and tuning errors, celeste detection, temperaments (historical and your own), velocity layers, round-robin variants, a wind model with pressure drops and oscillation, tremulants per division, swell boxes, a general crescendo, combination banks, MIDI learn on every control.

Missing pipes, filled

A rank with gaps, or a stop that exists only as an 8', is completed by pitch-shifted copies of the neighbouring pipes - several transposition methods, rebuilt offline into a cache, so that nothing is interpolated on the fly and nothing is altered silently.

Fast, measured, honest

The sound engine renders on all cores with a lock-free control thread; the polyphony display shows the real peak, the DSP field the busiest audio callback. Every start, device, load and crash is written to an activity log, and "Report a problem" in the Configuration Editor turns it into a bug report with one click.

The manual lives inside

The complete user manual is embedded: the question mark beside every option of the Configuration Editor opens the chapter that explains it, chapter names in the text are links, and a Find box searches it. Nothing is read from beside the executable; one file is the whole program.

What you need: sample folders (below), an audio interface (ASIO for the lowest latency on Windows; CoreAudio on macOS; ALSA or JACK on Linux), a MIDI keyboard or an organ console with MIDI out. RAM for the samples: a large wet organ with several perspectives needs tens of gigabytes; a small dry one runs on a laptop.

Download

One file. Put it anywhere.

OrganSampler is one executable: no installer, nothing written beside it. Each build comes as the archive native to its system - unpack it and start the program. Settings, voicing, combinations and the cache of filled pipes live in your application-data folder. The window title shows the version.

Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit: OrganSampler-windows.zip (OrganSampler.exe inside) - ASIO, Windows Audio (WASAPI) and the aggregated WASAPI device. The executable is not signed: Windows may ask once ("More info" → "Run anyway").
macOS 11 Big Sur or newer, Apple silicon: OrganSampler-macos.zip; Intel Macs, macOS 10.11 El Capitan or newer: OrganSampler-macos-10.11-intel.zip - CoreAudio. Not notarised: open the app the first time with right-click → Open. Both untested by the project so far.
Linux x86-64, glibc 2.38 or newer (Ubuntu 24.04, Mint 22, Debian 13, Fedora 39 and newer): OrganSampler-linux-x86_64.tar.gz (tar xzf; the executable bit is kept) - ALSA or JACK (PipeWire).

The macOS and Linux builds are compiled and self-tested by the project's continuous integration; they are young and less used than the Windows build - please report what you find.

Free software

Get the latest build

Every build on the releases page carries the three executables, the changelog and the corresponding source. They are marked pre-release: builds for testers, until the first release the project is satisfied with. Free and open source under the GNU GPL v3 - use it, study it, change it, pass it on.

Releases & changelog → Read the user manual ↗ Build from source ↗

Version 0.8.125. Source, issues and configurations on GitHub.

Samples

Folders of WAV files - that is all.

OrganSampler has no format of its own and needs no organ definition file. What it plays is a tree of folders: a top folder holding one folder per stop, each stop folder holding the WAVs of its pipes, named after their MIDI keys (036-C.wav, 037-C#.wav ...; several files for one key play in turn), with the releases in a rel subfolder and the microphone perspectives as prefixes (dir-, dif-, rear-). Loop points and the recorded pitch come from the WAV's smpl chunk; from the pitch the program learns the footage, the tuning and the temperament of every rank. In OrganSampler the words "sample set" keep their original, plain meaning: a bunch of WAV samples organised in folders - not a packaged virtual organ with a definition file.

Organ Samples                 <- the top folder you load
├── Principal 8
│   ├── 036-C.wav             <- a WAV per pipe, named after its key (several for one key play in turn)
│   ├── 037-C#.wav
│   └── rel                   <- the releases, named like the attacks
├── dir-Trompete 8            <- the "Direct" perspective of Trompete 8
├── dif-Trompete 8            <- the "Diffuse" perspective
└── Mixtura

Where the samples come from

OrganSampler ships no samples and never will: they are bought or downloaded elsewhere and stay the property of their authors.
Sonus Paradisi - sample folders in wave format usually work with OrganSampler as they are. The Stralsund, St. Jakobi, Wegscheider organ is the instrument the program grew up with.

Try it at once: Rural Organ

The demo organ - a small village organ, three divisions, 24 stops, dry recordings with IR reverb: the room comes from the two impulse responses the configuration puts on its routes. The one package that carries samples, with its portable configuration. Download RuralOrgan.rar (about 700 MB), unpack it - OrganSampler does that itself (top bar > Unpack archive) - then Load Configuration. Samples by Sonus Paradisi, free of charge to try the program.
More free material: Sonus Paradisi's Free stuff page.

Your own recordings

Record the pipes, name the files after the keys, put them in a folder per stop. Loop points and the pitch belong ideally in the WAV's smpl chunk (any audio editor writes it), but their absence is no obstacle: the program copes without them, and missing pipes are filled by transposition.
The exact rules: chapter "How the sample folders must be organised" of the manual.

Configurations, Organs

Someone kind has done the work for you.

A configuration is a complete organ built in OrganSampler - stop list, voicing, audio routes, couplers, combinations, crescendo - saved as one .json file. With a published configuration, a player who owns the same sample folders loads the whole organ in one step. The samples themselves are never published; a configuration only names the sample folders it needs, and the repository refuses anything else in its configurations folder. The samples are bought or downloaded elsewhere - from Sonus Paradisi above all.

Using one

Find the organ in the list of published configurations (the link below) and open its README: it says which sample folders it needs and where from, and its Download link gives the zipped .json.
Unpack it and put the .json beside the samples - in the folder that contains the top folders of the samples, as the README shows. Paths inside a configuration are relative to that folder, so the samples are found without a question.
Load Configuration in the top bar. If a folder tree is not where the configuration expects it, the organ loads with the trees it finds and the division shows "Sample folder not found" with the folder's name: load that folder in the Stop List and it takes the missing tree's place.

The list of published configurations ↗

Publishing yours

Save it with "Portable configuration (to share with others)" ticked: no MIDI devices, no audio devices, nothing of your computer - the organ only.
The program writes the zip for the upload and the README beside it (<name>.zip, <name>.README.md): fill in the organ, the producer and product of the samples, and your name.
Attach the two files to the form (the link below) and submit. A robot checks them and proposes them as a pull request; after the merge the organ gets its folder and its line in the list by itself. Only the zip and the README: no sample, no impulse response, nothing else is accepted, ever.

Send a configuration ↗

Problems and ideas

A report with the log is a report that gets fixed.

OrganSampler writes an activity log of every start, device, load and crash. A bug report that carries it is usually fixed in the next release; one without it often cannot be.

Reporting a bug

In the program: Configuration Editor → Report a problem... Describe what happened and how to reproduce it; the program bundles its activity log, crash reports, settings, the last self-test and a description of the computer and the audio devices into one zip, takes screenshots of its own windows (recommended - keep the dialog in question open), and lets you add screenshot files of your own.
It then opens the GitHub bug report in your browser with the fields filled in and the report folder on your Desktop: drag the zip into "Logs", the pictures into "Screenshots", and submit. A free GitHub account is needed to submit.

Open a report ↗

Feature requests

Say what you are trying to do and what the program should do - a concrete example of the dialog and the control helps more than a solution.

Contributing code

C++17 and JUCE 9, built with CMake on all three platforms (and the Projucer project on Windows). The rules are short: no path outside the repository, nothing read from beside the executable, no audio altered silently, a changelog line and a manual paragraph for every visible change.

Contribution guide ↗

The project

Free, open, portable

Maintained by zurek-jiri. OrganSampler is free software under the GNU GPL v3: you may use, study, modify and redistribute it, including commercially, under the licence's source-sharing terms. It is provided without warranty.

Built on the JUCE framework (AGPLv3), the Steinberg ASIO SDK (GPLv3 option, Windows only) and Signalsmith Stretch (MIT). The full licence texts are shown in the program under About & licences.

The licence ↗ Third-party notices ↗