Sound Manager

Much more than just beeps, Apple's Sound Manager and related Mac software components can be a route to low‑cost audio on a Mac.

As it was, as it is, and as it may be. Martin Russ looks ahead to where musical Macs may be going.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I can remember a time when the sound output from a computer consisted only of a beep when you pressed the 'Control' and the 'G' keys simultaneously! Since then, things have improved ever so slightly. When the Macintosh was first launched, its sound capabilities were relatively advanced — square waves, a wavetable 'synthesizer' and a 'four‑tone synthesizer'. It's worth noting that in the mid '80s, the ability to produce four simultaneous notes using 8‑bit values in a 256‑cell array would occupy about half of the processing power of a Mac 128K or 512K. (For completists, the Lisa and the Mac XL had only the square waves!)

Armed with sound‑generating power like that, the early Macs were rapidly encumbered with a number of interesting sound‑related distractions — replacing the simple 'beep' alert sound with something more interesting (and you had up to 5,000 8‑bit, 256‑point wavetables to play with) or even producing four‑part music via Musicworks. My personal favourite was the little accessory which produced a typewriter click every time you pressed a key, with the return key producing a satisfying whirr and clunk. It was fun for about 30 seconds — and then you turned it off forever.

On the MIDI side, single‑port MIDI interfaces were able to control rather more seriously professional music. Names of today like Mark of the Unicorn (SOS Volume 2 Issue 1) and Opcode cut their teeth in this era, whilst companies like Southworth Music Systems (SOS Volume 1 Issue 9) vanished into obscurity. In the States, the Mac continued being the MIDI musician's computer of choice via names like Digidesign, but Europe went with the Atari ST instead, eventually leading to the Steinberg and Emagic musical powerhouses of today — on both the PC and the Macintosh!

Sound Manager

Aliases can take some of the pain out of updating drivers.

Apple's System 6 introduced the Sound Manager, an evolution of the earlier Sound Driver with considerably enhanced features. AIFF files appeared, along with the square wave and wavetable synthesizers of old. The four‑tone synthesizer became the 'Sampled Sound Synthesizer', and development of this has been the focus of Sound Manager versions ever since. Sound Manager 3.3, which comes as part of QuickTime 3, allows playback of multiple channels of 16‑bit stereo audio sampled at 44.1 kHz — which is a considerable advance from the 11kHz sample rate and 8‑bit mono of the first Macs. QuickTime also provides another 'synthesizer': the General MIDI one. Once again, successive generations have increased the fidelity of the sound reproduction, and the limited number of separate samples and the lengths of those samples has gradually increased — for example, QuickTime Musical Instruments version 3 contains 2Mb of Roland‑derived samples. In fact, Apple's Sound Manager has increasingly become a software sample replay unit.

PC Soundcards

On the PC, sound was different. The beep started out simple, and the best way to improve it was to add a soundcard. Accordingly, a whole industry devoted to ISA‑buss soundcards has grown up, with a similar evolution from simple square waves, wavetables and Yamaha FM chips, through to 16‑bit 44.1kHz sophisticated 'synthesizers on a card'. In the process, daughterboard modules with additional sound‑generating capabilities have appeared, and MIDI interfaces are often available, albeit via a 15‑pin 'D' type connector. The latest generation of soundcards are now also supporting the PCI buss.

The difference with the PC is that to make almost any sound at all, you need a soundcard — there isn't the default hardware and software that you find on a Mac. As a result, soundcards are bundled in with PCs, and are often used as a flexibility point for sales: 'for £nn more you can have a much better soundcard, sir!'...

Macs may have sound facilities as standard, but when you want to move to digital, some of their renowned simplicity can give way to rather more complex decisions.

Going Digital

On a PC, the transition from soundcards to digital I/O cards has been relatively smooth. Since you need a soundcard, and because the market moves very quickly, users are used to changing cards when technology demands it. So moving from an analogue audio card to one with digital I/O as well is a simple step. On the Macintosh, things are less familiar — unless, of course, you have been running a Digidesign system. As a long‑term Sound Manager user, I recently decided that the time was right to move up to digital I/O, and replace my Macintosh's 16‑bit onboard analogue‑to‑digital conversion with something capable of higher resolution and potentially less interference‑prone. Having 18‑ or 20‑bit converters inside a computer isn't a good way of ensuring high fidelity, and one of the useful spin‑offs of PC soundcard technology is all the choices that are now available...

Well, that's the theory. I wanted a simple PCI S/PDIF and AES/EBU I/O card for a Macintosh, with stereo audio in and out. I would be using my DAT recorder as my audio front end initially, but this way I had the option of a stand‑alone high‑resolution front‑end converter should I need to upgrade at a later date. In a world just bursting with ASIO PCI cards you might think that my choices would be wide, but whilst there are a large number of cards available offering digital audio interfaces to computers, as soon as you tie down your specification, the range can narrow down very quickly. In my case, the combination of S/PDIF, ASIO, PCI and Mac led me to the Lucid Technologies PCI24 card (there's also a NuBus version, and for analogue I/O use, the PCI24dsp adds audio inputs and outputs).

PCI cards are usually easy to install, and the Lucid card was no exception. But ASIO and Sound Manager drivers are more of a challenge. In one step, you leave the cosy world of Mac software hand‑holding, and enter the world of software drivers. A quick visit to Lucid's web site showed that support for the PCI24 card was good — with a released update to the supplied drivers that came on a disk with the PCI24 card. But whilst I was downloading from the ftp site, I couldn't resist grabbing a couple of betas as well. In the end, I had the supplied‑on‑disk version, the current release version, and two betas of various drivers. If keeping track of all these bits worries you, then you should read this month's tip (see box above)...

Digital Sound

We've come full circle. From the Mac being superior in beeps, via PC soundcards versus Apple's Sound Manager, to the gap years where high‑end Mac users used Digidesign equipment, and Sound Manager was the only alternative, through the increasingly capable PC soundcards, to the current convergence, where, arguably, the Mac is now able to make the most of PC PCI cards!