Of course, they are straight forward enough to build that we don't need to ask for megafunding.
They are not 'straight forward' to build due to the technical skill required and the technical capabilities and quality of facilities needed to do good quality samples with consistent acoustic properties. Most large universities could probably do so with adequate funding.
- because buying one is probably out of the question, as you pointed
out VSL (and most other libraries) sell for absolutely insane prices. To buy one, we'd have to pay an amount equal to the revenue they'd lose, not what it cost to make one.
Agreed that 'buying one' is unlikely, at least no where near the price for which one could be created from scratch. I suggested that 1 million in funding might be reasonable though. So while not 'megafunding' it is certainly beyond trivial means.
- because we don't need to start out making a world class library in
one step, and a lower quality library is very inexpensive to make... we already have all of the resources we need to get started at our disposal.
I disagree for a couple of reasons - 1) you need to use the same recording location (the same music hall needs to be used for all sampling recording), similar microphone positioning, very high quality microphones (your typical home studio recording isn't going to have microphones of adequate quality to get good samples); and highly skilled players (the skill level of home recording artists will generally not be adequate). It is not something you can do in a distributed piecemeal manner and get quality results. Also for each instrument you will want to do all of the recordings for it in a single sitting so that you don't get significant differences from things like changes in humidity, or changes in the recording environment. The final engineering of the sound samples can be distributed (and since a significant chunk of the cost is the engineering of the samples after recording, collaboration can give good savings there).
I think that for right now, such a project is far enough outside of the scope of Wikimedia that this is the wrong forum to discuss it (really, even the Linux-sampler mailing list would be a better place).
From the Wikimedia statement of purpose
"The goals of the foundation are to encourage the further growth and development of open content, social software WikiWiki-based projects (see http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki) and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge."
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_bylaws#ARTICLE_II:_...
In my opinion this is perhaps the single most significant action that the Wikimedia Foundation could do to encourage the "further growth and development of open content" of the musical variety and thus is right in line with Wikimedias statement of purpose.
Tom M.