Essentially, this is because they just don’t WANT everybody to extract and re-use their samples - Spitfire Audio are a high-quality sample library company, and they graciously allow us to use some of their sounds for free by using their instruments - good enough for me. Still, they reserve the rights to their intellectual property - they don’t want people to extract their samples and use them otherwise. I respect that intention - maybe you could, too?
There are a ton of proprietary formats out there for sample libraries - and that is for two reasons:
- efficiency: having a compacted (and often compressed) format allows easier installation than copying thousands of .wav files.
- copy protection: sample library companies spend hundreds / thousands of hours to get these sample to sound just “right” - they want to control how that content gets used. Wav files can just get copied and distributed everywhere - that’s not a good model to recover the investment made in producing these libraries. So these formats are specifically made so the can’t just be “converted to wav”.
Plus, most of these sample libraries are spread across thousands of individual samples - and the patches aren’t only contained in the raw samples - there’s a lot of very smart zoning, layering and switching going on that makes the final sound so playable - not something you could imitate by just extracting the raw samples, even if you found a way.
If you want to use sample sets with your setup, simply search for free sfz or soundfont sample libraries - there’s still a ton of pretty good free content out there.
There are some tools that can “sample” a vst instrument (essentially, they play it automatically and record the output), but I don’t recommend that - the result is mostly not up to much.
And I can’t really condone “hacking” commercially produced content - even if provided for free. This is definitely against the producer’s intent and usually also against their terms and conditions.
Cheers,
Torsten