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This month sees Martin Walker meeting the men from Microsoft, burning CDs faster, listening to new SoundFonts and testing out utility software. Does he ever sleep?
I recently got the chance to meet and chat with members of the Microsoft DirectX team, who had flown over to run a Composer's Workshop for their new interactive DirectMusic utilities (see February 1999's PC Notes).
Many PC musicians will be surprised to hear that Microsoft are fully aware of our current problems with audio latency. The whole point of DirectSound is that it is designed to offload audio acceleration to dedicated routines on your soundcard. I was interested to hear that although any soundcard can use the Microsoft emulated DirectSound drivers, these have only ever been intended as a stopgap measure to help those without properly written DirectSound drivers provided by the soundcard manufacturer. Even more interesting was a remark that well‑written DirectSound drivers ought to have a latency of no more than about 100mS — I've used ASIO drivers with a higher latency than that!
I also discovered that DirectSound does include an audio capture routine — according to Steinberg the reason why they don't use it to provide audio recording in Cubase VST with their ASIO DirectX option is that the majority of soundcards still don't directly support DirectSound capture for low‑latency sound recording. Emulated support would still have high latency, and multi‑channel cards would still be limited to stereo.
Composing Yourself
If you're looking longingly at all those VST plug‑ins, but can only currently access DirectShow ones, fret no more — the VST to DirectX Adaptor (from Amulet Software) does all the hard work for you for only $50. Here it is running the VST AutoPan plug‑in inside Sound Forge.
The DirectMusic composer utilities themselves (incorporated into the DirectX Software Development Kit, or SDK) already seem very usable, although Microsoft stressed that they will evolve a great deal more. You can import standard MIDI files to work with, and then subject these to many different composer‑designed variations in real‑time. By using a randomly selected set of variations for each musical phrase, scores can be generated that never repeat exactly, and (which is even more important for games) the music can evolve on a phrase‑by‑phrase basis depending on what is currently happening in the game. Microsoft call this the Groove level, and as the game action hots up, so the Groove level number rises. The composer can arrange for different musical Patterns to be triggered when the groove level reaches a certain point.
The Chordmaps feature would also make an extremely interesting MIDI plug‑in. You can enter a series of chords and scales (these can also be subject to randomly selected variations, or adapt themselves to Groove levels) so that key and scale changes happen automatically as desired by the composer, and all the notes in the Patterns will be forced to conform to the series of notes available in the new scale. Thisis a little like the Scale Correction option of Cubase, but happens in real‑time in response to the current chord progression.
Although primarily intended as an engine for adaptive game music, the DirectMusic composer utilities will also be of use as a teaching aid, and could be useful for film composers who may need to rapidly generate a number of related pieces of music with a common core, but suitable for the differing moods required by individual scenes in a movie. The DirectX SDK is about 75Mb in total, and is available on CD‑ROM for a small nominal price, although I stress again that it's not primarily intended for home users.
Direct Music
You can download the new DirectX 6.1 core routines that incorporate DirectMusic from the Microsoft web site (www.microsoft.com/directx/downlo...), but as you might expect there is a huge amount of traffic, and download times for the 4.8Mb file can be very slow. I found it much faster to download from win98central.acauth.com/win98/directx/directx.htm. However, the DirectSound routines are still the same as in version 6.0, and although DirectMusic contains the composition engine and a software synth (licensed from Roland), to use this you will need a DirectMusic‑aware driver or application (such as the SDK).
Driving Faster
Yamaha recently sent me one of their new CRW4416S CD burners to try out. As the name suggests, this greatly improves on my current CRW4260S by providing four‑speed CD‑R writing as before, but doubling the CD‑RW rewriteable speed to four times, and increasing the read speed of all discs up to an excellent 16 times. With single‑speed drives reading at 150K/second, 16‑speed equates to a theoretical 2.4Mb/second, although real‑world figures rarely match this in practice. The access time drops from 250mS to 180mS.
The main reason that CD‑R burners are normally so much slower than normal CD‑ROM drives when reading data is that the laser obviously needs to be far more powerful to burn a CD, and this makes the head assembly much heavier. To get the playback speed up to 16x indicates that some significant improvements have been made in this area.
Overall, the drive is a great leap forward from its predecessor. The increase in rewriteable speed is certainly welcome, but the 16x CD‑ROM read speed makes it more feasible to use the drive by itself as a combined CD‑ROM reader and CD‑RW writer. In fact, the only downside that I discovered was that to combat heat generation there is now a tiny one‑inch cooling fan at the rear of the drive that emits a high‑pitched whine. During fast reads the drive does vibrate a fair bit (in common with many others), but of course this shouldn't worry musicians, since you are hardly likely to be reading CD‑ROMs while recording a sensitive guitar solo nearby. In addition, vibration levels do seem to be have dropped since I first installed the drive.
Software Supplied
Nearly all CD‑RW drives come bundled with suitable software, and the Yamaha arrived with Easy CD Creator Version 3.5a for Audio and CD‑ROM burning, and Direct CD Version 2.5a for packet CD writing (see May 1998's PC Notes). However, if you intend to use other applications such Steinberg's Wavelab or Sonic Foundry's CD Architect it's as well to check that your drive is supported before you buy it.
The list of supported devices for Wavelab can be found at Steinberg's web site (steinberg.net.com) in their Knowledge Base, and this does include the Yamaha CRW4416S as well as the CRW4416E (the EIDE version). You can download the latest cdrsetup.exe file to update your version if needed. I initially had some problems getting onto the Sonic Foundry web site, and after checking with their UK distributors it turns out that the URL has changed from www.sfoundry.com to www.sonicfoundry.com. When I found their web site at the new address, it turned out that there were updates for both Sound Forge (to version 4.5a build 228) and CD Architect (to version 4.0f Build 257). After downloading these I found that the Yamaha 4416S was supported.
The speed of CD Audio grabbing is a figure rarely mentioned in any manufacturer's literature, but Yamaha do quote a figure of up to 10x speed.I didn't manage this, measuring about 1100K/sec (about 7x), but this is still fairly fast for any CD‑R drive (some barely manage 2x, and this is possibly why the figure isn't normally bandied about). CD Audio grabbing worked well in all applications except Wavelab, which for some inexplicable reason locked up whenever I attempted to grab a track — this is being investigated at the moment.
Pentium III Support
Finally this month, it is encouraging to see that Intel are communicating more with music software developers, as well as supplying them with pre‑release processors. Only a few weeks after the launch of the Pentium III, various software updates are already appearing. Steinberg have already released a new version 3.65 of Cubase VST (a free download on their web site for existing 3.5 users) that supports the new instructions of the Pentium III processors mentioned in last month's PC Musician feature. They claim a 25 percent reduction in the processor overhead for EQ when running with a Pentium III (although EQ overheads were fairly low already), and an overall improvement of about 10 percent in the speed of the audio engine when compared with a Pentium II running at the same clock speed. This, I suspect, is also partly due to the 512K L2 cache memory running at full processor speed (like the Celeron range) rather than half processor speed (like the Pentium II range).
Another Pentium III‑optimised release is the Poly‑VL softsynth from Yamaha, which offers eight Virtual Acoustic voices (equivalent to eight VL70ms), along with up to 256 XG voices. Seer Systems have also optimised their Reality and Surreal softsynths for the Pentium III. For those who can afford to live on the cutting edge of technology, it is excellent news that software is already available that accesses some of the new Pentium III features.
Amulet VST to DirectX Adaptor
Since Steinberg released their VST plug‑in development kit, many third‑party developers (commercial, shareware, and freeware) have released plug‑ins that perform a wide variety of sonic manipulations. This is great news for VST and Wavelab owners, but until now not a lot of use to users of other DirectX‑compatible applications such as Cakewalk, Sound Forge, Acid, and Cool Edit Pro.
Spotting a gap in the market, Amulet software have developed the VST to DirectX Adaptor, an easy‑to‑use utility that appears in all DirectShow‑compatible applications, and lets you load and use VST plug‑ins. It worked well for me inside every application that I tried (even inside VST and Wavelab!), and the user interface is simplicity itself — just two buttons marked Load and Hide/Show. Clicking on load opens up a standard Windows open file dialogue to let you choose a DLL plug‑in file. Then you use it exactly as you would inside VST — if the plug‑in window disappears behind others you click on the Show button, and once this appears the button changes to Hide for the opposite function.
The Adaptor does impose a slight extra processor overhead, but offset against getting lots more plug‑ins no‑one should have any cause to grumble. It even deals with those basic VST plug‑ins that have no panel design of their own (like AutoPan for instance), by creating its own front panels as required. Designer Angus Hewlett is only asking $50 — sounds like a bargain to me.
For more information take a look at the Amulet Software Website (surf.to/amulet),
or you can telephone 07808 157 967 in the UK).
Sonic Implants
SoundFonts are becoming increasingly popular now that high‑quality audio is available from soundcards like the Emu APS and SB Live!, and various companies are releasing new sounds in this format. Hruska Audio Productions recently sent me a sample CD‑ROM of their Sonic Implants range, which includes some clever twists. For gamers, they have two replacements for the standard 4Mb GM/GS soundbank — Industrial Dance and Retro Synth. These are fully GM‑compatible, but have been carefully voiced to provide a different feel, so that any game using them takes on a different edge. For instance, the Retro Synth uses Mellotron string and choir sounds — I was particularly impressed by the Wurlitzer, Rhodes, and Mellotrons in this pack.
The 'before and after' samples on the CD are very effective — the standard GM soundtracks from Doom and Descent sound positively anaemic by comparison with the 'remixed' Sonic Implants versions. However, for any musician with original GM material that also needs kick‑starting, these could also be just the job. A huge range of other SoundFont collections is also available, ranging from Ambient and Electronica to Live Bands, and you can even buy a host of individual instrument sounds in the Sonic Singles range. Rather than even attempt to list the complete range, I suggest that you point your browsers at www.sonicimplants.com and take a look (and listen) for yourself. SoundFonts are sold directly from the Sonic Implants web site, prices range from just $9.95 to $34.95, and you can also download some free of charge to try out.