From mailserv@gaia.ucs.orst.edu Tue Nov 22 14:03:37 1994
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Date: Tue Nov 22 11:54:42 PST 1994
From: gus-music-request@gaia.ucs.orst.edu (GUS Musician's Server)
Reply-To: gus-music@gaia.ucs.orst.edu (GUS Musician's Digest)
Subject: GUS Musician's Digest V10 #18

GUS Musician's Digest       Tue, 22 Nov 94 11:54 PST     Volume 10: Issue  18 

Today's Topics:
                            Bank switching
                      classical guitar patches?
                   Gusmax and Cakewalk for windows
                       MIDI Adaptor problems!!
                              MID to MOD
                      Synchronized WAV & MIDI ??
           What happened to the interest in Bank Switching?
                             Yamaha SY-35

Standard Info:
	- Meta-info about the GUS can be found at the end of the Digest.
	- Before you ask a question, please READ THE FAQ.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Mon, 21 Nov 1994 16:33 -0500
From: WADLEIGH@PROCESS.COM
Subject: Bank switching

>I really hate switching to Patch Manager and manually switching banks 
>for every midi file played.  I should have waited one more year and 
>bought a Roland Sound Canvas (as well as recommend my friends not to 
>buy this card).

Strange response.  It amounts to throwing away all custom patching for 
because you couldn't take it all the way to custom bank switching.  I 
happen to favor the combination of a GUS and an SCC-1 over any of the 
new Rolands with sampling.  It's cheaper, does better sampling, and 
provides more voices.

When incremental patch caching becomes available (yes, it's really just 
a matter of time) it will be a great enhancement to what is already a 
great tool for the price.

If it means that much to you, maybe you can find some hotshot device 
driver authors and get them interested.  The SDK is still free.

Hal

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 1994 09:25:50 +0100 (MET)
From: tgakem@chem.tue.nl
Subject: classical guitar patches?

Does anyone know of any good classical guitar (i.e., nylon string)
guitar patches. There seem to be a lot of electrical guitar patches
around, and some rather nice steel string guitar patches, but the
only replacement of nylon string guitar I found (in propats2 or so)
sounded more like an electrical harp :{ Does anyone know whether there
is a better one in propats3, or the mn-patches (if that is what they're
called). I would also be interested in a patch with harmonics of a nylon
string guitar, and with a damped nylon string guitar (or what classical
guitar players call `pizzicato').

Any comments highly appreciated,

Eric Meijer

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 1994 10:23:19 GMT
From: Clarke Brunt <CLARKE@lsl.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Gusmax and Cakewalk for windows

>I have recently installed the latest version of cakewalk pro for
>windows, and I am having some problems with loading patches when
>I want to play midi files. For example the song Striving. I get an
>error message which says that I don't have enough memory to load all
>patches. How can this be, when I CAN play this song with, for example,
>the soundstudio?

It's a while since I did this, but I seem to remember that the
problem happens if you have Program Change events on channel 10.
Channel 10 is percussion, but very often there is an event
selecting Program 0 (which would be acoustic piano if this was
a melodic channel). Cakewalk tries to cache these patches for
use on channel 10, the Windows driver returns an error, and
Cakewalk assumes this is because you haven't got enough memory,
rather than carrying on regardless.

Solution is to edit the channel 10 track(s) and remove the Program
Change events. I don't know if there is a newer CakeWalk which fixes
this.

This should really be in the "Music Digest" rather then the "General",
but there are so few posts in the former, it seems pointless.

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 1994 00:14:11 +0200 (EET)
From: Tuomas Koskela <tkoskela@zombie.oulu.fi>
Subject: MIDI Adaptor problems!!

	Hello there!

	This is my first posting, so be kind to my mistakes...

	I've just bought a new computer with GUS Max with MIDI
Adaptor. My main problem is: every time I try to send any MIDI-
message (note on, mod, etc.) to my computer, it crashes. Eve-ry-
ti-me! All I get is a message: "Memory parity error detected
System halted". Only cure is that reset-button; no Ctrl-Alt-Del.
	Funny (...) thing is that MIDI-output-port is working
just fine. No problems. Adaptors LED's are flickering always,
so there's MIDI coming and going. All I need is a one key down
and MIDI-byte into computer and there we go again...
	I have tried different DMA's and IRQ's, so I don't think
the main problem is there. Can anyone help!!?? I'm getting bit
desperate.
	My system is: 486DX2/66MHz, 8MB, 420MB, 128kB Cache,
internal modem, Mitsumi CD-ROM, and GUS Max with Ensoniq EPS16+.
No SCSI, no fancy MIDI-systems (yet :-)
	Any help appriciated.


		Tuomas Koskela
		Department of Physics
		University of Oulu
		FINLAND

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 21 Nov 1994 22:25:00 -0500
From: dave.stubbs@canrem.com (Dave Stubbs)
Subject: MID to MOD

Heddo all,

Is there a program that will convert MIDI files to MOD files
as long as a library of patches is provided?  While I'm on
that topic, where can I find a library of MOD patches?

Thanks for yer help,

Dave...

 * OLX 2.1 TD * This tagline is umop apisdn

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 1994 14:27:23 -0500
From: mpc@mbsmm.com (Mark Clements)
Subject: Synchronized WAV & MIDI ??

Greetings, All.

I am collaborating on a long-distance composition, and have a tape of
incomplete songs provided by my partner. I will be creating my parts
on a sequencer, which brings me to my question:

Does anyone know of a sequencer that lets the GUS play a .WAV file
that is synchronized to the MIDI metronome? You know, so that when I
record or play my sequence, the .WAV file starts playing (like backing
tracks). Ideally, it would also be able to start playing the .WAV file
from any starting location (i.e., if the song has a tempo of 120 bpm,
then it should know that if I am starting to record at measure #8, it
should start playing the .WAV file at the 14 second mark).

That way, I could record a song from the tape on to my disk, and then
just use the .WAV file in the sequencer as another ``track''.

Is there anything out there that does this?

Mark Clements               mpc@mbsmm.com              "Arf, she said."

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 94 08:19 MET
From: hst@mh.nl (Klaas Hemstra)
Subject: Re: What happened to the interest in Bank Switching?

>A couple of weeks ago, I was quite impressed and happy with the 
>discussion of Bank Switching.  It is what the Advanced Gravis UltraSound 
>card should be easily capable of doing to take advantage of its RAM 
>capability and the capability of using different patches.  Now it seems 
>the interest in this important subject is dead.  What's going on?

The subject has been discussed a few times already. 6 months, some
weeks before the first "bank-switching" driver came out, the
discussion was held also. The bank-switching sceme Gravis build into
the software is not exactly what i would like to have either.

But there is a problem with bank-switching and the way the sequencer
or midi-player programs will handle the bank-switching information
with regard to the patch-caching calls. Not many will do anything with
it, and i do not think Microsoft defined how to do it as they did with
the patch-caching calls in the first place.

As discussed recently a cache-patches call that adds the patches
instead of clearing the memory first would solve the technical problem
(as far as i can see...).

>Does anyone know if Advanced Gravis has considered any of what was said here?  
I am not so sure.

In a previous digest i made some comments about patch-caching and the
way people would use them (in my opinion). Never got a reply from
Gravis.
>
>Do they even bother reading this digest?  If I don't get a response 
>within a week, I guess I'll respost what was said here to the GUS General 
>Digest, even if I have to waste the bandwidth just to get it heard.  
>Sorry for sounding so harsh, but I'm quite fed up with this.  I really 
>hate switching to Patch Manager and manually switching banks for every 
>midi file played.  I should have waited one more year and bought a Roland 
>Sound Canvas (as well as recommend my friends not to buy this card).

I still like the way my GUS works, and what i can do with it.
And the way Gravis is working to improve drivers etc. is not bad at
all.

But i also think the bank-switching sceme is not yet perfect.
Making your own patch-bank with patch-manager is only one way to add
your own patches, adding some extra (different) patches to your midi
file is another...

Klaas

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 1994 07:12:17 +0100
From: A.PAUW@ELSEVIER.nl
Subject: Yamaha SY-35

Aside from the UltraSound questions, is anybody using a Yamaha
SY-35 synthesizer? It is quite cheap. All I know it is a 16-voice
polyphonic, 8-midi channelled, FM/wavetable synth. It looks good
on paper, but how good is it in real? Can anybody tell me what a
reasonable price is for this thing? I found things like 500
English pounds, 1790 Deutsche Mark (Yamaha price), how much will
it cost in Holland, or what should be reasonable. I talked to
one dealer who told me they are not worth their money.

Help!
Albert
a.pauw@elsevier.nl

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 1994 05:46:34 +0100
From: A.PAUW@ELSEVIER.nl
Message-ID: <G00017F5122NOV199407454970*@MHS>

Oh George,

don't be angry, I am still interested in bank switching. What I
have done the last week was building some percussion banks
according to Rolands GS standard. I have the Jazz/Brush/Electronic/TR-808 
banks ready. All the patches which they have in common with the
Standard bank (i.e. bank 0) stay simply only in bank 0 (fall-back
system). But then comes the big problem. Trying to switch the
GUS Windows drivers using the CC00/CC32 codes did not work. At
least I got the banks ready, but it should be up to Gravis to
support incremental patchloading. The reason I built up the
percussion bank is that only one bank can be selected, because
there is one drum channel, keeping the limitation on the GUS
Windows driver in mind. But nope, it seems one can only use
Patch Manager and a few (very) dedicated software to do this.
The standard CC00/CC32 midi bank select does not work.

Well, I must say that support from Gravis is quite fragmentary.
I send  an e-mail asking about bank switching and had no reply.
I send in a second registration card (i.e. just a card, 'cause I
send mine in February to Logitech in Switzerland) and asked for
some kind of acknowledgement (... dear sir, you are in our
database ...), but had no reply. And I live in Holland! 
Sorry for letting myself go.

Last, I found that the latest Windows drivers (3.57) got rid of
the squeek at the end of wave files most of the time, but
sometimes you hear it a still a little. Secondly, when the .AVI
player starts the sound is  too soft. Pausing and continuing solves 
this and brings back the right volume. I don't know if this is a bug 
in the .AVI player but it wasn't there in previous driver releases.
So it would be time for a better Windows driver INCLUDING
incremental patch caching, as this would make the GUS much more
flexible for us to use.

Albert
a.pauw@elsevier.nl

------------------------------

End of GUS Musician's Digest V10 #18
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