Figure 1: Cakewalk Pro Audio v7. As mentioned in last month's PC Notes, the Cakewalk suite is now up to version 7. Here's a glimpse of the new Audio and MIDI virtual mixing console.
Updating software ought to be a simple matter, but often things don't go according to plan. Martin Walker catalogues a selection of problem areas.
I have just bought a bargain sale item — a brand new, boxed, Korg Wavestation SR, which had been languishing in a dusty corner of a warehouse. Since I own several universal editor/librarian programs, as well as sequencers with utility options that enable you to send and receive System Exclusive (SysEx) dumps, I had always assumed that adding appropriate drivers for a new instrument would be a simple matter, but this does not seem to be the case. To determine the correct procedure, the first port of call should always be the manual (or help file). Now although most PC applications tell you how to select devices when first installing the whole program, it's amazing how difficult it can sometimes be to track down any instructions about adding support for further devices. The obvious place to look first is the Install section, followed by a search through the index for the words 'New', 'Update', 'Devices', and so forth.
<h3>UPDATING DEVICE DRIVERS</h3>
My MIDI Quest universal editor/librarian had an obvious 'Downloading New Instruments' section, but still referred to logging onto a bulletin board — the Internet website took over from this a long time ago. Many manuals have an easily found 'Adding New Devices' section, but this may only allow you to select from the devices that you first installed with the application, and not help at all in the case of new instruments. Often only one small file is needed from the original CD‑ROM, but since various compression methods are used, it may be tricky to access this by hand. Other applications need to create new folders to hold multiple files, as well as creating a new initialisation file which points to them, making a quick device update equally difficult.
Thankfully, if you are downloading new support files from the Internet, most websites also contain detailed instructions on how to install such files (which reduces the load on a software house's telephone support helplines), and in some cases taking a look at the website can end up being considerably quicker than wading through the manual or help file. It may also guide you past any problems that arise from new files needing to be installed from a different source than the original installation CD‑ROM or floppies. Some applications insist that the Setup.exe program is run again, but let you ignore the main program installation and only install the appropriate device file. This is fine for adding devices already on the installation disks, but may not help with Internet updates.
If the worst happens, and there seems to be no mention of how to add support for a new device to an existing application, you may be tempted to run Setup.exe again in its entirety, on the grounds that this normally has provision to select devices at some point. However, if the entire application has to be re‑installed, there is another potential problem to negotiate. There are now so many application updates (aka 'bugfixes') available via the Internet, that the chances are that a complete re‑install may return you to an older version of the application! After adding your new device support, to safeguard against this, always check the version number when you next run your application — if the installation has overwritten files with older versions, you may have to dig out and re‑run the Internet updates to return to the latest version. Tedious or what?
Am I also the only one who finds it tedious when net updates sometimes come with instructions to copy the files to a floppy disk, and install them from there? You can often ignore this and point to a folder on your hard drive containing the appropriate files, but this can quickly grow complicated if several floppy disks were used, since the install procedure will keep requesting further floppies. This is the reason why some CD‑ROMs contain folders labelled Disk1, Disk2, Disk3, and so on — they are simply copies of the original floppy disk version. In the end, it is often easier to give in and create a new floppy as requested.
Finally, anyone like me who now has a CD‑R drive as well as a CD‑ROM may also encounter some strange quirks during future software installations. TC Works make it very clear that their Native EQ plug‑in, for example, should be installed using the 'first' drive, and this recently gave me the clue to solving a weird problem...
My QTools/AX DirectX plug‑in had decided to stop working (it failed after insisting that I insert the original CD‑ROM while looping a 10Mb WAV file — protection at its most bizarre), but when I tried to re‑install it from scratch it just didn't want to know, giving me an error and aborting every time. The solution turned out to be moving the CD‑ROM installation disk to my CD‑R drive, which allowed the setup program to run. Then part way through, it insisted on the same disk being moved to the other CD‑ROM drive, followed by a necessary move back to the CD‑R to complete the installation. Moral: if you are planning to add a second CD drive to your PC, get ready for some unexpected fun and games.
The Processor Fairy
Figure 3: Sonic Foundry XFX2 pack. First mentioned in our March 98 PC Musician section, Sonic Foundry now have their XFX2 set of six DirectX plug‑ins available, which include several EQ's and Dynamics processors. The Graphic EQ is the most different from its previous incarnation within Sound Forge, with a click‑and‑drag frequency response. The prices of both the XFX1 and XFX2 packs have now been halved to £99. Call SCV (0171 923 1892) for more details.
I had another sobering experience this month. When reviewing the TC Works Native EQ plug‑ins, I measured a particularly low processor overhead, and double checking against other plug‑ins, discovered that everything was consuming about half the overhead than before. I even managed to run three instances of Waves' Trueverb in series. Unfortunately, the processor fairy hadn't replaced my Pentium 166 MMX with a Pentium II when I wasn't looking — I had accidentally loaded in a music file with a 22kHz sample rate for the tests!
The moral of this tale is that unless you really do need a bandwidth wider than 10kHz, you can do a hell of a lot more plug‑in processing with your current machine by simply using a lower sample rate. Try it — you will probably be pleasantly surprised at how good it sounds.
Mind you, for those few minutes before the penny dropped, I gained an inkling of what it must be like to have a powerful PC, and not have to think every time before switching in another plug‑in. Having said that, it often surprises me just how much my machine can achieve, despite its lowly status. There are plenty of musicians out there with slower machines than mine doing lots of useful work, and it is so easy to become locked into the techno‑lust spiral, forever wanting larger or faster hardware.
Sadly, what topples us over the brink to buy yet another hardware upgrade is the software. I'm not yet convinced that the majority of musicians are rushing out to buy more and more expensive effects plug‑ins, especially given the excellent selection already provided with most modern sequencers and the free ones available for download from various websites. Now that multi‑channel soundcards have given us many more outputs, it is perfectly possible to carry on using our hardware effects via an external mixer — you don't have to rely solely on software effects.
Software developers seem to have identified the market for more cost‑effective plug‑ins. Witness the EZ Waves pack, the two Sonic Foundry XFX packs (see Figure 3), and the forthcoming Native Essentials from TC Works — all at prices that most people can afford. There will always be a place for the full‑priced package that offers the very best professional performance, but even at the budget end of the market, software plug‑ins remove the twin bugbears of hum and hiss. With these banished, I suspect many people will be perfectly happy not to have the ultimate algorithm.
PC Sound Bytes
Figure 2: Musician's CD Player. For the perfect way to learn that solo on CD, try the Musician's CD Player from Roni Music — grab any section from an audio CD and play it back at up to one‑third speed at the same pitch (see main text for details).· There is a new version 2.0.4 driver available for the Darla/Gina soundcards from Event (www.event.com). This now supports multiple cards (multiple Ginas can also be synchronised using their S/PDIF port), 32kHz record and playback, and switching between consumer /professional S/PDIF modes without rebooting. There is also a SAW compatibility mode that adds dummy inputs so that the number of inputs and outputs are equal, plus various minor bugfixes. After installation of the new driver and a reboot, I encountered some strange malfunctions during playback in both Wavelab and Sound Forge, but these were totally cured after restarting the machine from a cold boot.
· If you have ever tried to play along with or just analyse other people's music on CD, you'll already know how difficult it can be. Roni Music (of Sweet Sixteen sequencer fame) have just introduced the Musician's CD Player, which is an extremely useful and easy to use utility for Win 95.
Insert an audio CD, simply enter start and stop positions, then click on the cycle box in the CD section (see Figure 2) — this portion will then keep looping round. This is handy in itself, but by clicking on 'Record' in the Wave section, you create a temporary WAV file which can be timestretched by 0 to 300%. Voila! You can now loop the same section of audio, at the same pitch, but at up to one‑third of the playback tempo. Perfect for working out those tricky solos. Musician's CD Player is shareware, and a demo (which will run for 30 days) can be downloaded from Roni Music at home1.swipnet.se/~w‑11396. The full version is only 25 US dollars. One of the beauties of shareware is direct access to the author — after I suggested marker buttons to click on while the CD is playing (avoiding the need to type in values for start and stop times) a new version appeared on Roni's website within a few days. Now that's what I call feedback!
PC Desktop Tips
Although many people like to customise their PC desktops, some of you may not realise that you can also adjust the Taskbar to suit your preferred way of working. Most people know that Start, Settings, Taskbar has an 'Auto hide' option, reducing the height of the Taskbar to a thin line which then pops up when you move the mouse over it. This gives you more of your screen to play with, but it is also possible to re‑size the Taskbar (move the mouse near its edge, and then click and drag to make it larger or smaller). If you have more than half a dozen applications running at once, this allows their icons to be larger. However, by clicking on any blank part of the Taskbar, and then dragging around the screen, you can place it at the top or either side of the desktop.
Here's a further Taskbar tip for surfers of the Internet — since so many websites take a long time to appear, and you can launch multiple browser windows (Ctrl+N does this for Netscape), it is often more useful to temporarily unclick the Taskbar 'Auto hide' option. You can then monitor the progress of multiple site downloads, since once they reply, the filename for the appropriate Taskbar entry will change from 'Netscape' to the URL of the site. I can quite happily have half a dozen or more Netscape windows running, and click on the one that appears first. This has the added benefit of keeping the phone bill down.