Hi,

As my Roland MT32 and SC88 are getting quite old, I am looking for a new
MIDI sound module.

The primary use of that module will be for home practice of baroque
music with a MIDI controller. My current controller is a Roland FP3
digital piano, but I will be moving on to some sort of double manual
MIDI controller in the future, probably a double MIDI organ when I can
get a good deal on one. I prefer to keep my sound source separate from
the controller, so I won't consider any of the all-in-one
"workstations". Not that I have seen any with 2 manuals, anyway ...

I just need more realistic sounds than what my Roland gear currently
provides, especially for the harpsichord and organ sounds. I take
lessons on acoustic harpsichord and it is painful to practice at home.
The lack of key-click is a big problem, but overall they just don't
sound that good ...

I would like a module which can load samples so that it is not set in
stone to the preset sounds. I play everything in guitar center every
year, and to this day I can't say there is a harpsichord preset I
actually like on any gear ... Unless I can find a good third party
harpsichord sound library, there is a good chance that I will want to
record my teacher's wonderful 9' double harpsichord and use the result
to play at home. Anything to avoid buying an acoustic harpsichord, which
would need to be tuned regularly, and won't fit in my house.

I already have (more than) what it takes to record the samples - a
Roland VS2400 CD workstation, and a pair of AKG C3000B mics which I have
been using for acoustic piano recording successfully.

However, I have never recorded just samples to build a library, or used
a sampler synth before, and I would really appreciate tips from those
who have done that before, and what's involved.

I would much prefer a hardware solution that doesn't require a noisy
computer to be on in order to play. So, I'm looking at either the Triton
Rack and the Fantom XR. Both are similarly priced (about $1400).
Expandability is a key, and ease of use is very important.

I looked at the Triton Rack at Guitar center yesterday, which they setup
just for me, and it appeared to have a lot of the features I want, but
the thing was really hard to use and I was stuck reading the manual for
a while just to try to just use the presets. Very frustrating ... I
think it might do the job but there is going to be a steep learning
curve ... Unfortunately, they didn't have the Fantom XR to look at.
Supposedly it is easier than the Triton Rack. It is also a lot newer.

I was hoping owners of either unit could give some insight about the
following :

1) how do you like the variety/availability of third party samples for
your unit ? Does one unit have an edge over the other as to how much
software is available for it (eg. more formats) ?

2) do you know of good libraries for baroque instruments (harpsichord,
organs, clavichord) that will work in the Triton Rack and/or Fantom XR ?
Any URLs / demos greatly appreciated.

3) is the time to load samples reasonable ? And what's the best media (I
was thinking SCSI CD or HD) that you end up using ?

4) how hard is it to create a new sample from an acoustic instrument ?

I was thinking of sampling the instrument with my VS2400CD, exporting
the samples to WAV files on a CD, and loading them into the new sound
module somehow. Obviously there is one missing step to assign the WAV to
keys, etc.

Also, I wonder how the synth handles notes of different durations (ie,
attack, sustain) given a single sample, or even multisamples ... Is that
something that needs to be manually entered ?

I'm just trying to assess how much work this really is. Assuming I had
short samples for, say, every key of the harpsichord, how much of a
project is it to create a sample with one of those modules ?

Korg has only their quick start manual online, and nothing for Roland,
so I can't really assess the task myself ...

Thanks !!!

In article ,
says...
As my Roland MT32 and SC88 are getting quite old, I am looking for a new
MIDI sound module.

(Greetings from c.o.o.multimedia. Nice to see you here.)

Sorry I don't have a response to your question. But...

Have you looked at all into Software Samplers? Gigastudio, Kontakt,
VSamper, Halion, that sort of thing? The sound libraries are much more
realistic, since they stream samples from the hard drive and are able to
have huge sample sets (gigabytes worth.)

Also if you are serious about sampling a genuine harpsichord, then a
software sampler is much easier to program.

Of course the drawback is that you have to have a PC running to use them
(OSX or Windows) but IMO their benefits outweigh their drawbacks.

If you do go SoftSampler (or if you just want to investigate), the
NorthernSounds forum is a good source of info:
http://www.northernsounds.com/forum/index.php?

Hi,

wrote:

(Greetings from c.o.o.multimedia. Nice to see you here.)

Hmm, do we know each other ?

Sorry I don't have a response to your question. But...

Have you looked at all into Software Samplers? Gigastudio, Kontakt,
VSamper, Halion, that sort of thing? The sound libraries are much more
realistic, since they stream samples from the hard drive and are able to
have huge sample sets (gigabytes worth.)

Also if you are serious about sampling a genuine harpsichord, then a
software sampler is much easier to program.

Of course the drawback is that you have to have a PC running to use them
(OSX or Windows) but IMO their benefits outweigh their drawbacks.

As I explicitly said, I didn't want to have a computer running when I play.

Since you know me as an OS/2 user and developer, you will easily
understand that I refuse to use Windows or any product from Microsoft
for ethical reasons.

If a good software sampler was available for OS/2 or Linux along with
drivers for pro audio hardware, I would consider using it however.

As for Mac OS X, I have also given that a try. In 2002, I got one of the
very noisy "wind tunnel" dual G4s that drove me crazy. Apple refused to
fix it. I had such a terrible experience with them that I sold the
machine altogether and will never buy anything from Apple again.

So, my preference goes to a hardware synth.

If you do go SoftSampler (or if you just want to investigate), the
NorthernSounds forum is a good source of info:
http://www.northernsounds.com/forum/index.php?

Thanks, I will take a look.

On Wed, 7 Jul 2004 22:38:54 UTC, Julien Pierre
wrote:
wrote:

(Greetings from c.o.o.multimedia. Nice to see you here.)

Hmm, do we know each other ?

I'm sure you don't remember me, but we met at either the first
Warpstock, or Warp Expo West. Those are the only OS/2 conferences
I've been able to attend. I'm also a paid-for-and-still-user-of
MMPACK on my old Thinkpad 380 which I use to record MIDI drum tracks
into MIDIStation. And now I'm sitting back home, posting from OS/2.

As I explicitly said, I didn't want to have a computer running when I play.

You said you didn't want to have a _noisy_ computer running. There
are some very quiet (almost silent) computers available that are
custom designed for recording studio use. They cost somewhat more
than the standard noisy system. And they're far more silent than my
Kurzweil K2000 with the sampling option. But of course:

Since you know me as an OS/2 user and developer, you will easily
understand that I refuse to use Windows or any product from Microsoft
for ethical reasons.

I understand completely.

If a good software sampler was available for OS/2 or Linux along with
drivers for pro audio hardware, I would consider using it however.

There are Linux drivers for pro audio hardware
http://www.alsa-project.org but my experience with Linux has been
mostly a nightmare. If you want to investigate audio on Linux, Planet
CCRMA is a good place to start:
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/

As for Mac OS X, I have also given that a try. In 2002, I got one of the
very noisy "wind tunnel" dual G4s that drove me crazy. Apple refused to
fix it. I had such a terrible experience with them that I sold the
machine altogether and will never buy anything from Apple again.

So, my preference goes to a hardware synth.

Your Apple experience was most unfortunate, I'm sorry to hear it.
These days, hardware synths just can't keep up with the soft synths in
terms of realistic sounding emulations of acoustic instruments. But
you also may be disappointed with the sound of the soft synth as
well... I just suspect that your disappointment will be less with a
software synth version of a large sampled harpsichord or organ.

One of the best all in one libraries is the Garritan Personal
Orchestra which uses the Kontakt engine:
http://www.garritan.com/mp3.html download some of the mp3 demos and
give a listen. Its drawback (aside from being either Windows or OSX)
is that you aren't allowed to edit the samples. In order to do that
you would have to buy the full version of Kontakt. I'm not trying
to push you into soft synths, I'm just trying to show what's out
there.

I'm sorry I can't help you with your hardware synth question. I've
almost completely switched to soft synths.

On 2004-07-07, Julien Pierre wrote:

Since you know me as an OS/2 user and developer, you will easily
understand that I refuse to use Windows or any product from Microsoft
for ethical reasons.

Excellent (though I don't quite see what makes IBM more virtuous
than Microsoft).

If a good software sampler was available for OS/2 or Linux along with
drivers for pro audio hardware, I would consider using it however.

I don't have any specific recommendations to offer, but you
might want to root around in http://linuxsound.atnet.at/.

As for Mac OS X, I have also given that a try. In 2002, I got one of the
very noisy "wind tunnel" dual G4s that drove me crazy. Apple refused to
fix it. I had such a terrible experience with them that I sold the
machine altogether and will never buy anything from Apple again.

So, my preference goes to a hardware synth.

I use Ardour for tracking. The noisy PC that runs Ardour is in a
different room. DISPLAY is set to an underpowered--but silent--PC
that sits above my keyboard and acts as an X terminal.

Your situation is even simpler since you don't need to interact
with the computer while you're playing. You could just put the
PC in another room and use long MIDI/audio cables.

In case you're curious, these links describe how to set up
diskless machines :

http://etherboot.sourceforge.net/doc...mentation.html
http://www.ltsp.org/support.php
http://www.vlug.org/vlug/meetings/X-...n/details.html
http://www.etherboot.org/doc50/html/diskless-4.html
http://www.xs4all.nl/~hreuver/linux-xterminal.html

--
André Majorel URL:http://www.teaser.fr/~amajorel/
Respect for government [...] and its symbols is fundamentally fascist.
-- William Sommerwerck, on the subject of ****ing on a national flag.

In article ,
says...
I just need more realistic sounds than what my Roland gear currently
provides,

Berklee's lower-level synth labs are outfitted with Triton Racks and
Roland XP30's. In my MIDI-for-idiots class I had to create sequences
using several voices from each. I will say that I was always at a loss
to find any usable sounds in the Korg; I usually picked the Roland for
every single track, and then assigned the two least-important tracks to
the Korg just to meet the requirements of the assignment. I also find
the user interface completely inscrutable.

I haven't heard any of the third-party libraries for the Korg. The
Roland had a very nice, usable orchestral library. Overall, I've been
generally impressed with the expressiveness of Roland's samples - in
fact, my SC-880 provides the *only* usable sax sound I have ever heard,
short of piecing together different articulations from Quantum Leap
Brass or similar brass libraries.

Also, keep in mind that the Roland has an excellent audition interface,
which the Korg doesn't have - it plays short sequences in the character
of the sample, such as a funk riff for a bass or a moody solo for a sax.

If you want something to put up against the Roland, consider the Yamaha
Motif Rack. Excellent sounds from what I heard at the store.

--
Jay Levitt |
Wellesley, MA | Hi!
Faster: jay at jay dot eff-em | Where are we going?
http://www.jay.fm | Why am I in this handbasket?

Jay,

Jay Levitt wrote:

Berklee's lower-level synth labs are outfitted with Triton Racks and
Roland XP30's. In my MIDI-for-idiots class I had to create sequences
using several voices from each. I will say that I was always at a loss
to find any usable sounds in the Korg; I usually picked the Roland for
every single track, and then assigned the two least-important tracks to
the Korg just to meet the requirements of the assignment.

I also find
the user interface completely inscrutable.

Yes, that seems to be the big downside of the Korg.

I found that Korg has all their manuals online and downloaded the Triton
Rack books from Tritonhaven.com yesterday. I may be able to gather some
of the information that I need from there.

Roland on the other hand doesn't put the manuals online. That seems like
a really big problem for such a complex piece of gear as a rack module .
You may only find out the limitations long after you buy it . Perhaps
that's what they want. I don't like it, though and may not buy it in the
first place.

I haven't heard any of the third-party libraries for the Korg.

It claims to be able to load AKAI libraries. To what degree, I don't
know. It can also load WAV / AIFF files, but you have to build patches
from them.

The
Roland had a very nice, usable orchestral library. Overall, I've been
generally impressed with the expressiveness of Roland's samples - in
fact, my SC-880 provides the *only* usable sax sound I have ever heard,
short of piecing together different articulations from Quantum Leap
Brass or similar brass libraries.

I'm familiar with the Roland sounds, I think the SC88VL I have shares
many of the same sounds as the SC-880 . And in fact, when I play I
usually end up using the SC88 sounds instead of the ones built-in to my
Roland FP3, despite the FP3 being about 6 years newer.
But I'm still not satisfied with the SC88 ;-)

Also, keep in mind that the Roland has an excellent audition interface,
which the Korg doesn't have - it plays short sequences in the character
of the sample, such as a funk riff for a bass or a moody solo for a sax.

If you want something to put up against the Roland, consider the Yamaha
Motif Rack. Excellent sounds from what I heard at the store.

From what I read of the specs however, the Motif rack is limited to the
built-in sounds. So that would mean that if I'm not happy with the
built-ins, I am stuck. That's why I wasn't considering Motif rack.
I played the Motif keyboards at Guitar center and didn't care for the
harpsichord sound on them . So if Motif rack has the same sounds, then I
don't think it's for me.

Andre Majorel wrote:
On 2004-07-07, Julien Pierre wrote:


Since you know me as an OS/2 user and developer, you will easily
understand that I refuse to use Windows or any product from Microsoft
for ethical reasons.


Excellent (though I don't quite see what makes IBM more virtuous
than Microsoft).

This isn't so much about IBM being particularly virtuous (although they
did provide a much better product with OS/2, software-quality wise), but
rather about Microsoft breaking the law repeatedly in many ways. It is
well documented, if you google you will find many hits. I think the best
place to start is http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm if
you are interested in the topic. There is a case with the European union
as well. IBM didn't do these things, and they also provided a stable
32-bit multitasking OS in 1992, at a time when no one else had anything
close for desktop PCs (Microsoft had Windows 3.1!). However, I don't
think this is really the forum to discuss this subject, so I will stop
now. It is enough reason for me.

If a good software sampler was available for OS/2 or Linux along with
drivers for pro audio hardware, I would consider using it however.


I don't have any specific recommendations to offer, but you
might want to root around in http://linuxsound.atnet.at/.

I have been on Linux audio lists before but had problems with basic
low-level drivers that couldn't be resolved. The traffic on the lists
was also too high for me to digest. Perhaps I will try again but my
impression was that audio on Linux was not mature. Certainly more active
than the OS/2 multimedia situation ever was, though, but the products
that are available seem difficult to setup and use, and the variety of
distributions was a big problem in getting everything to work. Often
there were recipes for one distro that just wouldn't work in the others.
This isn't very helpful when trying to make music. I would much rather
pay for something that is polished and works. If I wanted to write the
program myself, I would, except I just don't have the time. I did in
fact write some code to play some notes from samples in real-time from a
MIDI keyboard on OS/2 around 1996, but never released it - it was
pushing my Pentium 100 a little bit too much.

I use Ardour for tracking.

Seems that product does the things that I bought my Roland VS-2400CD DAW
for, but from what I read on ardour.org, it does not feature the
real-time sample-based MIDI synth that we are talking about here.

The noisy PC that runs Ardour is in a
different room. DISPLAY is set to an underpowered--but silent--PC
that sits above my keyboard and acts as an X terminal.

Your situation is even simpler since you don't need to interact
with the computer while you're playing. You could just put the
PC in another room and use long MIDI/audio cables.

My MIDI keyboard is in my home office, in a closet with the doors
removed, there isn't much room to add a monitor above. The MIDI modules
(SC88) are on a shelf above the keyboard. A rack module is really ideal
for my situation.

I don't have another room for a loud PC. I won't put one in my bedroom.
I already have a bunch of computers, and they are all in that same home
office room. Some of them loud, others quiet, but I usually turn them
off while I'm playing due to the noise. I'm a programmer and the
machines I own are mostly loud dual-processor with 10k and 15k rpm SCSI
disks, so obviously I have to turn them off. Also, space is at a
premium and I don't want extra monitors anywhere - I use a single flat
panel on a KVM switch. The room is only 10'x10'.

In case you're curious, these links describe how to set up
diskless machines :

http://etherboot.sourceforge.net/doc...mentation.html
http://www.ltsp.org/support.php
http://www.vlug.org/vlug/meetings/X-...n/details.html
http://www.etherboot.org/doc50/html/diskless-4.html
http://www.xs4all.nl/~hreuver/linux-xterminal.html

I know the principles and I even set that sort of thing up with OS/2
servers and clients in the past, in the days of 10 mbit ethernet. It was
difficult to do, and performance was not too great, to say the least.
But in this case there isn't a good reason to do it since the noisy
server would still be in the same room.

Hi,

wrote:

I'm sure you don't remember me, but we met at either the first
Warpstock, or Warp Expo West. Those are the only OS/2 conferences
I've been able to attend. I'm also a paid-for-and-still-user-of
MMPACK on my old Thinkpad 380 which I use to record MIDI drum tracks
into MIDIStation. And now I'm sitting back home, posting from OS/2.

I was posting from OS/2 as well, as you may notice in the headers.
Glad you got a MIDI sequencer that works for you on OS/2. I tried to use
MIDI station before but it was tedious. My current main PC (a dual
Athlon) doesn't have an ISA bus anymore, so I can't install the MPU401
ISA card in it ... Hence no MIDI :-( I meant, but never got the time, to
write OS/2 MIDI drivers for USB MIDI. I still keep an old K6-3 PC around
so I can use the MPU401 MIDI card - not just for OS/2, but also for the
many DOS games between 1988 - 1998 that have great MIDI music, notably
on the MT32 and SC88.

There are Linux drivers for pro audio hardware
http://www.alsa-project.org but my experience with Linux has been
mostly a nightmare. If you want to investigate audio on Linux, Planet
CCRMA is a good place to start:
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/

Thanks for the links.

As for Mac OS X, I have also given that a try. In 2002, I got one of the
very noisy "wind tunnel" dual G4s that drove me crazy. Apple refused to
fix it. I had such a terrible experience with them that I sold the
machine altogether and will never buy anything from Apple again.

So, my preference goes to a hardware synth.


Your Apple experience was most unfortunate, I'm sorry to hear it.

Yes, it really was. You can read about it at :
http://www.g4noise.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=305
http://www.g4noise.com/forum/index.p...=265#entry1568

These days, hardware synths just can't keep up with the soft synths in
terms of realistic sounding emulations of acoustic instruments. But
you also may be disappointed with the sound of the soft synth as
well... I just suspect that your disappointment will be less with a
software synth version of a large sampled harpsichord or organ.

If I build my own patch set and the synth is programmed correctly,
hardware or software, it should meet my needs ... Of course there needs
to be a good D/A converter too.

One of the best all in one libraries is the Garritan Personal
Orchestra which uses the Kontakt engine:
http://www.garritan.com/mp3.html download some of the mp3 demos and
give a listen. Its drawback (aside from being either Windows or OSX)
is that you aren't allowed to edit the samples. In order to do that
you would have to buy the full version of Kontakt. I'm not trying
to push you into soft synths, I'm just trying to show what's out
there.

The Bach demos on harpsichord sound quite nice indeed .

On 2004-07-08, Julien Pierre wrote:
Andre Majorel wrote:

I don't have any specific recommendations to offer, but you
might want to root around in http://linuxsound.atnet.at/.

I have been on Linux audio lists before but had problems with basic
low-level drivers that couldn't be resolved. The traffic on the lists
was also too high for me to digest. Perhaps I will try again but my
impression was that audio on Linux was not mature. Certainly more active
than the OS/2 multimedia situation ever was, though, but the products
that are available seem difficult to setup and use,

I'm not sure what "problems with low-level drivers" you're
referring to, but real-time audio on Linux has been working very
well for me for some time now.

It's not that complicated either, when you know how. Take a
stock 2.4 kernel, apply Andrew Morton's low-latency patch and
Robert Love's preempt patch and use Alsa. Enable low-latency at
boot ("echo 1 /proc/sys/kernel/lowlatency"). Make the audio
process(es) put themselves in the SCHED_FIFO scheduling class
(you need root privileges), and you have stable audio in the 2ms
range.

#include sched.h

struct sched_param param;
memset (&param, 0, sizeof param);
param.sched_priority = sched_get_priority_max (SCHED_FIFO);
if (sched_setscheduler (0 ,SCHED_FIFO, &param) != 0)
fprintf (stderr, "sched_setscheduler: %s\n", strerror (errno));

Not exactly a turn-key solution but I assume that specialised
distros like Agnula or Planet CCRMA do it all for you.

Morton's low latency patch :
http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/schedlat.html

Love's preempt patch :
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kern...t-kernel/v2.4/

Agnula :
http://www.agnula.org/

Planet CCRMA :
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/

I use Ardour for tracking.

Seems that product does the things that I bought my Roland VS-2400CD DAW
for, but from what I read on ardour.org, it does not feature the
real-time sample-based MIDI synth that we are talking about here.

Ardour is a DAW, not a sample player. I was just citing it as an
example of a computer-based application that can be used without
the noise problems associated with computers.

Your situation is even simpler since you don't need to interact
with the computer while you're playing. You could just put the
PC in another room and use long MIDI/audio cables.

My MIDI keyboard is in my home office, in a closet with the doors
removed, there isn't much room to add a monitor above.

I was not suggesting that you take the monitor, keyboard and
mouse with you. But it's a moot point since, as you say, you
don't have a spare closet...

--
André Majorel URL:http://www.teaser.fr/~amajorel/
Respect for government [...] and its symbols is fundamentally fascist.
-- William Sommerwerck, on the subject of ****ing on a national flag.