Re: Q: Applied Engineering Sound Card

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article pubpc1@library.ucla.edu writes...

>Have you tried Pyware's MusicWriter?  I heard that it was awesome.
>You worked with sheet music on the screen, which was printable at
>high resolutions (the music symbols were in a font and a TrueType
>version was available for users of Pointless).  You could play the
>music using the Ensoniq, up to 15 simultaneous notes.  It was what
>the Music Construction Set and Music Studio tried to be, but never
>was.  Of course it had a price tag to match its capabilities.

    MusicWriter, "awesome"? Well I think you heard wrong then (pun
intended ;). MusicWriter does use the Ensoniq chip for playing back
music sequences, but it does an awful job. Quite frankly I think it
is the absolute poorest attempt at utilitizing the chip in the 10
years the GS has existed (excluding Mindscape's Paperboy or Gauntlet :).
I've heard C=64 and Mac Pluses do equal or better synthesis than
MusicWriter.

    The program itself may be a different story when it comes to
placing note scores on screen, editing and working with MIDI
(although I always thought the interface and color scheme looked
a bit ugly). Given the fact it's synthesis is hardly usable, it
would make better sense to just use MasterTracks Pro instead.

>Agreed.  The fact that the chip was only given half the memory it
>could address always bothered me.  How difficult would it have been
>to set it up so that you could allocate DOC-RAM from main RAM, like
>you would do a RAM disk?

    Apple really should have left two empty sockets on the motherboard
so users could add their own 64Kx4 DRAMs at a later time (that with a
jumper so the IIgs could detect whether 64K or 128K DOC-RAM was present).
Of course there were at least a dozen silly things Apple left out that
were trivially to add, but that is Apple Computer for you, and yet
another reason I'll not buy another Apple product in future.

    Too bad Apple didn't update the chip, the "GS" on the front of the
case could have stood for the 'GS' sound standard, and not just Graphics
and Sounds. :) (Many MIDI files use what is called the GS or GM standard).

>My question is: how about a MIDIsynth variation that that can handle
>DOC-RAM swapping and thus larger waves?

    There was discussion about this a couple of years back. It should
be doable, but you would need a very fast accelerator to have a "MIDI
version" of NoiseTracker GS. I waited though, but no one ever wrote
such a program and it doesn't look like anyone ever will at this point.
I'm less disappointed about it now, since last night I just installed
a Roland SCC-1 board into my PC (it literally doesn't even sound like
computer synthesis, you'd swear it was the real thing! :). Needless to
say, I don't think I'll be tinkering in synthLAB much more (other than
maybe sending MIDI-output to the Roland ;).

>>The final blow to the chip was the low-pass cut-off filter that the
>>GS added. Apparently, from what I'm just finding out now, regardless
>>of whether the chip or software played a sample at 44.1 kHz (or other
>>high frequencies) the filter would essentially drop the quality down
>>to around 26 kHz.
>
>Mitchell, could you post the passage from this article?  From what
>I've read, the GS does not have such a filter, but the Amiga
>does.  The author of the article that I read said that the Amiga's
>sound can sometimes be cleaner because it has a low-pass cut-off
>filter that filters out the ultrasonic frequencies.  He said that
>the GS lacked such a feature.

    The Ensoniq has no low-pass filter, but there _is_ one on the IIgs
motherboard (everything coming out of the chip has to go through it).
This lowers the quality of the Ensoniq when your playing higher
frequency sound (roughly anything above 26 kHz). I have heard that
the Amiga 1000 had a low-pass filter as well, but you could modify
the board to by-pass it (I think the Amiga 500/2000 also had one,
but you could disable it through software?).

    Article? Well I do have an e-mail message from David Empson who
was explaining the technical details behind the low-pass filter, but
I don't want to post it without his permission. It certainly does
exist though, I've found references to the low-pass filter in some
Addison Wesley books and it should be covered in the Apple II technotes.
It definitely is not an advantage to have one. :/

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca