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Re: Better sample of Crate.Synth music synthesizer

Simon Williams wrote:

Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:



I've posted a better sample of the output from my AppleCrate
music synthesizer.



Very cool. Interesting that you've chosen a piece of music that not only
demos the capabilities of the AppleCrate synth in a fairly dramatic way,
but is also "transparent" enough to allow its flaws/limitations to be
easily heard... "full disclosure" I guess ;-)


I chose Gymnopedie because 1) I like it, 2) it was all piano,
and 3) it was short enough to make a good test case.

It has turned out to be a better test case than I expected.  ;-)


I've eliminated the cassette transfer, so the speed and pitch
are now exactly as it performs the piece.  I've also slightly
improved the voice, so that it is more "pianolike".



You are too modest... the voice improvement is quite dramatic.


Thanks!  I expect to improve it further...


A couple
of minor (but nagging) bugs in the timing have also been fixed,
so all notes in a chord that are supposed to sound together
actually do.  (This is a little trickier than it sounds, since
the notes are scheduled on the machines with little regard for
what that oscillator played previously.  The result is that the
same chord is often played by different machines at different
times--and you shouldn't be able to tell the difference!)



Does this mean that programming tracks with multiple instrument voices
would be problematic? 

No, since it does pay a "little regard" by trying to retain
affinity of an oscillator with a track.  Each oscillator can
be preloaded with multiple instruments, limited by available
memory.


There are still "ticks" where notes "release", but I know how
to get rid of them with more tricks...  ;-)
With that taken care of you'll have a pretty serviceable sequencer... 

And I've just about got it...but this is Easter weekend.   ;-)


I'm adding "paging" to the MIDI conversion program, so that
it can handle large MIDI files.



I've never really looked at MIDI that closely, but presumably it
wouldn't be too hard to put together a sequence editor in Applesoft...
I'm assuming all this effort is intended to do more than play midi files
downloaded off the net ;-)


I haven't considered writing a MIDI sequencer, since there are
a bunch of them available on various platforms, including the
//e and the IIgs.

I began thinking that a MIDI-to-synthesizer conversion program
in Applesoft would be pretty easy--until I started looking at
all the variations allowed by the MIDI format!  My conversion
program has grown a bit, and is now around 7KB (with lots of
comments).


I've also decided that a voice editor with real-time sampling
of the edited voice would be very useful in building a voice
bank, so there's another project...



I hope you've got time for all this ;-)


I will have, eventually.  ;-)

-michael

New Applesoft BASIC interface for NadaNet networking!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/