Buying A PC For Music, Part 2

In part 2 of this short series, Paul Nagle looks at adding MIDI and sound to your PC setup. This is the last article in a two‑part series.

With last month's introduction to the hardware and software of a PC safely out of the way, it's now time to look at adding MIDI and sound. I've been using my PC for music for the last three years or so, and hope that by describing some of my experiences, I can help others to avoid some of my difficulties.

Investigating Interfaces

Unlike the humble Atari ST, the PC doesn't have a built‑in MIDI interface, so unless you buy from a dealer who specialises in music (a good idea if you don't know an MPU from an IRQ), chances are you'll have to install one yourself. This is the area where the PC, as described by PC fanatics, seems to be the ultimate in versatility. You want it to do what? No bother, just bung in a card, squire.

As explained last month, this is also potentially one of the most confusing areas for the PC newcomer, since it involves some knowledge of card addresses and IRQs (interrupts), plus some basic dexterity with a screwdriver. If the instructions supplied with the card are clear and you have a relatively uncluttered system and a prevailing wind, you might plug in the card, run a setup program and be chugging along within 20 minutes or so. But take a tip from me and don't reassemble the PC until you know everything works as it should.

Which MIDI card should you choose? There are so many of them, ranging in price from about £50 to well over £200, with new ones appearing all the time. Some permit future expansion so that you can add extra MIDI channels later, perhaps when you've bought that new multitimbral synth. Adding several separate interfaces is another way of breaking the 16 MIDI channel barrier, or alternatively, you could go for one of the more expensive multi‑port cards, with all the space‑saving advantages this brings.

Roland's MPU401 interface has long been the standard for MIDI on the PC. Before Windows 3.1, you needed to be wary of buying an unknown card for fear that your software would not talk to it, but just about every MIDI program recognised the Roland, and MPU compatibility became a 'must'. Windows 3.1 changed all that, and now each music program should be able to communicate with any card by means of its Windows drivers.

An MPU‑compatible card can still be a good bet if 16 channels are OK for your needs; MIDI In and Out are provided via external connectors, since a standard PC slot is not wide enough to take MIDI sockets. In cases where no more slots are free, or if you've got a laptop PC, external serial or parallel interfaces can provide that vital MIDI connection. I wouldn't advise one as an alternative to a dedicated internal card, though, and if you must go this route, it's advisable to try it out with your machine first.

It is becoming more common for synths to feature built‑in serial connectors (the Yamaha TG100 and TG300, Korg 05R/W, Roland SC7, and so on) which allow direct access to the synth via Windows drivers. These don't 'waste' any of your precious MIDI channels and are ideal for General MIDI, which might need all 16 channels at once.

For some time, I owned a TG100, which sat quietly on a serial port, doing its job very nicely, and all credit to Yamaha for providing the TG100 Windows drivers and editing software for free. I've no objection to synths getting smaller and cheaper to manufacture if you can hide them away (even inside the computer) and tweak everything via a familiar software front‑end, and for me, only the most knob‑ridden synth can compete with this for ease of use.

Before installing any new card, you need to confirm that its address and IRQ are actually free in your machine. In the case of an MPU‑style card, the base address as shipped is 330 and the IRQ is 2. If you've installed Windows 3.1, you'll have been provided with a program called simply MSD.EXE. This is Microsoft's Diagnostics and can be used to determine useful information about components of your system. Fortunately most cards come with some form of documentation which explains how to change the address and IRQ, should these clash with something else. Having a clear understanding of the cards you've already got fitted is the best way to avoid potential pitfalls; I keep details of mine handy, which helps whenever I experiment with something new.

Soundcards & Hard Disk Recording

The tiny speaker built into most PCs delivers bleeps and squawks with cheerful monotony, and few programs attempt to use it for anything meaningful. As the PC began to evolve from merely a serious business computer into a Nintendo rival, the need for sound became crucial and several standards appeared, the most well‑known of these being the Sound Blaster, which provided plinky sounds via an FM chip, plus sample playback — just so you could hear those aliens scream! Samples in PC‑speak are known as Waves — file suffix .WAV — and you can create them in a variety of sample rates and from mono 8‑bit to stereo 16‑bit. If you've a modem, the world's bulletin boards are brimming over with interesting samples, ranging from sound effects to snippets of classical music, all of which you may find a creative use for.

Soundcards are a cheap way to get into basic digital audio, providing facilities for on‑board sampling and playback. Extras such as a General MIDI chipset and a MIDI interface are often included, along with bundled wave editing software and maybe a sequencer. I still recommend a dedicated MIDI interface as your main In, but I have used the additional 16 channels provided on a soundcard's Out with no problems.

Forget the myth about Sound Blaster compatibility — in a purely musical context this has no value at all and is only really used to enhance the annihilation of malevolent goblins and their ilk. Far more important is the quality of digital audio and that of any on‑board synth. Cards such as the Creative Labs AWE32 and Turtle Beach Maui, Tropez, and so on, allow samples to be played and transposed via MIDI. For a little over £200, they offer a budget alternative to a dedicated rack sampler, with onboard memory that is expandable using standard PC SIMMs. In the case of the Turtle Beach cards, excellent wave editing software is thrown in, which is a delight to work with compared to the tiny LCD screens of samplers I've owned. Stereo samples can be looped, arranged over the keyboard and treated in a variety of interesting ways, all with a wiggle of the mouse. As for the AWE32, it has a reasonable sample editor and a good freebie sequencer (Cakewalk Apprentice) plus a Sound Bank Creation program (Vienna) complete with access to resonant filters, envelopes, reverb and chorus.

Other soundcards can be coaxed into replaying samples alongside a music program, although without sample transposition. For example, Steinberg's Waveplayer program allows your soundcard to replay WAVs from within any Windows sequencer. Samples are assigned to MIDI keys and then accessed via a Windows driver in the same way as another MIDI port. Other programs, such as Cakewalk Professional, allow WAVs to be inserted for playback without the need for an external program or driver, and Lowrie Woolf's Seqwin goes even further in its integration of audio and MIDI with a built‑in sample editor.

It is quite possible to construct an entire backing track with guitars, drums, vocals and tree frogs, sample it as a .WAV file and then trigger it from within your sequence — not that this is a replacement for a hard disk recording system, but it sure works.

Although the recording quality that can be achieved using ordinary soundcards can be quite acceptable, this factor also depends on the card's interaction with other components of your system. Many hums, whines and buzzes are sourced not in the audio card but are passed on from other devices sharing the bus. This is why all the top hard disk packages have their own dedicated external audio processors and digital I/O.

Very few of the cheaper soundcards facilitate simultaneous record and playback, although the Turtle Beach Tropez comes to mind as one possibility (about £250). Without this, any kind of low‑end hard disk recording will always be less than satisfactory, even if your software is up to the task.

CD‑ROM

If your PC has a CD‑ROM drive, programs such as CD‑Grab and CD Power Pack offer the means to directly convert CD tracks to .WAV files. This means that no actual audio sampling needs to take place, so quality is maximised. Even without these specialist programs, sampling from an onboard CD‑ROM is a piece of cake: before converting to a PC‑based sampling system, I always found the whole process just too much like messing about in the dark. Now I sample everything that moves, just for the joy of cutting, pasting, reversing and generally mousing around with it afterwards.

We've looked at pseudo hard‑disk recording, involving .WAV files being triggered from within a MIDI sequence, but the PC also has the genuine article — starting with the sub‑£100 Sound Impression and Digital Soup from Digital Music and Wave for Windows (Turtle Beach), through to the mid‑range Software Audio Workshop (£550) and Quad (£449) to the real heavyweights (over £2,500) with SADiE, Digidesign's Session 8, and Soundscape, which all come with serious additional hardware for their audio processing (see SOS June, July and September '93 respectively).

Cubase Audio (£799) also requires additional hardware, in the form of Yamaha's CBX‑D5 or Digidesign hardware. E‑Magic's Logic Audio is expected to be released in March or April '95.

Tales Of The Unexpected

Adding a new card isn't always painless and can be a frustrating process, especially as your system grows and becomes more complex. The worst kind of problems are when the machine simply won't boot with a new card installed. This has happened to me on two separate occasions and I wasted hours swapping cards around, even trying different hard disk controllers and graphic cards in an attempt to trace the conflict. Both cards worked in other machines, though, so I had to conclude that there was something odd about my particular VESA motherboard. Fortunately for me, these were exceptions rather than the norm.

Assuming you get beyond the power‑up stage, other conflicts can manifest themselves in a variety of annoying ways — from a slowing down during MIDI playback to complete lock‑up. Intermittent ones are always the hardest to trace, PC components being the mixed bag that they are. When DOS, Windows, Windows drivers and a new music program are added to the equation, the result is often that nobody will accept responsibility for problems — especially if they're not too familiar with PCs. Reporting faults can be frustrating:

"Hello, I'm having difficulty using my CMS 401II MIDI card with your program."

"Yes, the Windows drivers for it are crap — try the manufacturer."

"Oh, but they work OK with other programs."

"So what? Other drivers work OK with our program."

And so on...

If you use Windows For Workgroups 3.11 (some newer PCs come with it ready‑installed) as an alternative to Windows 3.1, this may cause some difficulties with support. Windows 3.1 can run in two modes, standard or enhanced, and many music software houses suggest running in standard mode, as it is slightly faster. WFWG's standard mode is hidden, though — you need the command WIN/D:T to start it. As your system grows, the limited pool of free IRQs will become used up and you may be forced to share — preferably with something safe, such as LPT2 (usually intended for a second printer). One to avoid is whichever COM (serial) port the mouse lives on, as using this often causes unpredictable results.

Diagnostic programs tend not to know much about MIDI interfaces, so don't be surprised if your card doesn't even register — if you forget which interrupt and address it uses, remember that you can check in the Drivers option of Windows. In fact, each time Windows is started, it checks all the devices it knows about. A message such as 'MPU IS NOT RESPONDING' is a sure sign of a conflict — if you haven't changed anything recently, then maybe another program confused it. Games which play music via the MIDI port sometimes do this and a hard reboot (posh term for switching off) is usually needed.

Multi‑function cards are useful if free slots, addresses and IRQs are in short supply. My own sound card, the Creative Labs AWE32, also provides a CD‑ROM interface and an extra MIDI output. Adding a new hard disk too, can be complicated. Don't let anyone tell you that you simply slot in another. With IDE, a second (or slave) drive, needs to be totally compatible with the master. Sometimes even drives from the same manufacturer cannot be used together unless they are exactly the same model. A better solution is to add a SCSI drive, although this will mean an initial outlay for yet another controller card. SCSI is faster and it is far easier to add new SCSI devices later.

Music Software

Last October's SOS looked at seven of the current budget sequencers for the PC. At the top end, the PC is now well supported, having Mastertracks Pro, Cubase, Logic, Cakewalk, MaxPak, Encore, Finale, Personal Composer and so forth. Of course, PC sequencer programs have been around since the early days, with Voyetra and Cakewalk being long established under DOS. With the success of Windows and PCs in general, conversions from other platforms are common, which usually leaves the PC release lagging a little behind the Mac or Atari. Although Windows 3.1 is considerably better than version 3.0, it is still quite possible for a program to not only crash itself but take Windows with it too. Nasty.

There's a quick rundown in matrix form of my favourite three Windows sequencers (Steinberg Cubase Score, Emagic Logic and Twelve Tone Systems Cakewalk Professional), in Figure 1, with apologies to Passport's Mastertracks Pro which, although pretty solid and reliable, is not exactly overburdened with innovative features.

If you wish to use notation to edit but not to print, Cubase 2.5 is about £100 cheaper, although personally I'd prefer to be able to print a score but would happily ditch the score editor. Other music programs, such as Band In a Box, Music Station, Soundtrack Express and Jammer, are designed to perform auto‑accompaniment or to be used to generate ideas, or to quickly lay down a song. Synth editors are represented by the MIDI Quest and Lizard generic editors. X‑Or, another generic editor and librarian, seems to have vanished from the scene, which is a shame.

Conclusion

If I appear to have been hard on the PC in some places, I'm quite sure it can take it. This is not a computer that will live or die depending on its success in the world of MIDI, nor will it be allowed to change at such a rate that software cannot keep up. When the long‑awaited 32‑bit Windows95 appears, we'll see if it delivers the much‑needed improvements to version 3.1. If it fails, OS2 and other operating systems are waiting in the wings, but I'd be surprised if this happens, as most people stick with what they know and don't give two hoots about what's underneath their word processor or sequencer.

The PC's massive user base will ensure a long life — just take a look in any newsagents and compare the number of PC magazines with those devoted to any other computer. The PC can turn its hand to anything and everything, with a bewildering array of word processors, spreadsheets, graphics, fractals, databases, games, multimedia, and now MIDI programs in its arsenal. As the Information Superhighway becomes more a part of our lives, Microsoft and the PC will be there too. Your PC could be synth, patch editor and librarian, sampler, sequencer, hard disk recorder, auto accompaniment and music tutor. With CD‑ROM, a built‑in DAT drive, video card and modem, you could take on the world.

But before we get too excited and put all our eggs in one basket, I should point out that if you take the step and buy a PC, you invariably become trapped on the upgrade roller‑coaster, with just about every gismo seemingly essential. Take a step back for just a moment and consider the Atari ST and how the ultimate add‑on was once considered to be a 40Mb hard disk. You could just about get the PC operating system on that!

So is the PC the next computer for you? Is there anything wrong with your old one anyway? I hope that by reporting a balance of good and bad I might have helped you at least to go in with your eyes open. Either way, there's no doubt that the PC is going from strength to strength in the world of MIDI and its software is improving all the time. Ultimately, this jack of all trades will continue to dominate personal computing, not for any technical superiority but because of its diversity, versatility and sheer weight of numbers.