Hello all -- Nowadays, one would emulate an organ with a "virtual
organ" software, I'd say. The main ones, as far as I know, are
Hauptwerk, GrandOrgue and jOrgan. All three products/projects are
active, as far as I have seen. I have tried this a few years ago
with GrandOrgue, but never came around to some finished process.
And, of course, I do not have the necessary sound files for all
the ranks.

Reaper is a great software; I use it for all "music production" in
our pop band, where I play keyboard, and I have also recorded small
ensembles with it, so yes, it is definitely worth the few dollars or
Euros. But also here you'd need sound files of the ranks to get the
real sound.

Of course, distributing the notes into MIDI tracks according to rank
is possible, either manually or with a program that "knows" about the
"forte", "piano" or specific rank tracks.

Jody, your suggestion of using a Reaper plug-in is interesting.
I wouldn't have done it like that, but rather would have written a
preprocessor that eats an "organ MIDI" (where, e.g., chain holes for
rank switching are coded as notes) and would output a "standard MIDI"
with multiple tracks according to the ranks of the organ. This way,
this would be completely independent of Reaper or Cakewalk or whatever
music software would interpret the MIDI file.

The main thing, though: Could someone punch out a couple of
single-note-playing rolls or organ books and then record the isolated
single sounds professionally so that one could use these for either
standard soundfonts -- using sfz or whatever soundfont player to
synthesize them in Reaper, Audacity, GarageBand or whatever, or even
to create ranks for jOrgan, etc.?

Or has one already done this, for a number of band organs?

Regards,
Harald Mueller
Grafing near Munich, Germany

 [ "SFZ" is a file format which defines only the behavior of
 [ musical instruments and does not include the sample content.
 [ Ref. https://sfzformat.com/ 
 [ "sforzando" is a free, highly SFZ 2.0 compliant sample player. 
 [ Ref. https://www.plogue.com/products/sforzando.html -- Robbie