From mailbox.syr.edu!naherzin Sat Oct 31 20:37:26 1992 Received: from mailbox.syr.edu ([128.230.18.5]) by watdragon.uwaterloo.ca with SMTP id <168407-1>; Sat, 31 Oct 1992 20:37:18 -0500 Received: from rodan.acs.syr.edu by mailbox.syr.edu (4.1/CNS) id AA10327; Sat, 31 Oct 92 20:37:44 EST Received: by rodan.acs.syr.edu (4.1/Spike-2.0) id AA00839; Sat, 31 Oct 92 20:32:59 EST Message-Id: <9211010132.AA00839@rodan.acs.syr.edu> To: jmsellen@watdragon.uwaterloo.ca Subject: 1990 April Date: Sat, 31 Oct 1992 20:32:58 -0500 From: "neil herzinger" Status: R Date: Wed, 4 Apr 90 15:26:02 -0400 (EDT) >From: Neil Anthony Herzinger To: Neil Anthony Herzinger Subject: S-series group changes O.K. I'm going to change a few things around. First of all Eric Crawley and others suggested I make this a reflecting list, thus messages will be bounced directly to everyone. This will increase the spontinaity of the group as I realize it must be a pain for you to send in something and wait for my lazy butt to digest it. This will make it a bit easier for me as well because my favorite site (in my room) has no editing capabilities, thus I have to find an open terminal on campus (and at CMU, that's next to impossible) to do the digest thing. If anyone is opposed to this idea, or they don't want the message load, let me know and I'll see what we can work out. The major problem is that I have no idea how to set this up. I will be contacting my advisor and others 'in the know', so if it is possible I should be able to set it up soon. In the meantime, I will do it manually (I don't mind, because I have very easy access to my account and simple features such as resending mail.). I will go ahead and send the responces I got from issue three, they will follow this message. Because the author will be the message sender (as opposed to 'S-series request' or something) I would suggest starting all subject headings with S50: or something similar. All messages should still be sent to me directly, at least until I set up the automatic system. Now on to important stuff! I received my PSL tape the day I sent the last issue (yes, the same day I said I was going to call them). I will post a full review (along with the Soundsations review I promised), but I will tell you now that I was pretty impressed with the demo disk. PSL, by the way has two soundsets. A D-50 set (10 disks, 64 sounds) and a Midi-stack set (6 disks 18 sounds). Any comments or questions or clues on how to set up and automatic mail system are welcome as usual. neil -- Date: Sat, 7 Apr 90 16:22:14 -0400 (EDT) >From: Neil Anthony Herzinger To: Neil Anthony Herzinger Subject: S-series sound reviews Well I finally got around to it. What follows are reviews of two third party sound manufacturers. PSL Productions D-50 Sound Set for the Roland S50 MIDI Textures sound set for the Roland S50 I ordered the demo cassette and disk for these two soundsets, so that is what my review is based on. First off, the demo disk only has two sounds on it, one from the D50 and the other from the MIDI textures. Both of these sounds are excellent! The D50 soudn is entitled 'Shamus' and has the classic D50 digital sound. It is a long, perfectly looped sound and very useable. The MIDI texture sound is called 'Lost World' and is very powerful. It has a grand piano attack and some digital pads in the sustained section. The D50 sound is only one sample but it transposes over the entire keyboard very nicely. The MIDI texture sound is made up of three multisamples. There is a slight sound variation between samples, but quite minimal considering the thickness of the sound. Now for the demo cassette. This has got to be the lamest demo I've heard, and the man who made it should be shot. I say this because the announcer has 'BIG REVERB' on his voice and sounds like a lame top 40 dj. The musical selections they choose to play are quite pitiful as well. The quality of the recording isn't so great either, but they might be to pre! vent sampling the tape?!?!? Amazi ngly enough though, I took a very careful listen to the tape and the samples are still very impressive. Many of the breathy fat sounds are reproduced quite well. The set also has many of the brass, bass, and stacoto sounds of the S50. The D50 set is made up of 10 disks, each disk has about 6 sounds. There are a total of 64 sounds. They include a list of names as well, so if anyone is interested I will send/post them. The MIDI Textures set is made up of 6 disks, each with 3 sounds. They list the keyboards used as: 5 Kurzweil modules, 2 D50's, Korg M1, and a DX7. They also include a list of names, but I guess that wouldn't be useful to anyone. I am very impressed with all sounds and will probably get the D50 sounds if my budget allows. The price of the set is $69.95 (minus the cost of the demo stuff if I send it back). Since this is only $7 a disk (compared to $15-$35 that other companies ask) I can justify the cost. Unfortunatly the MIDI set cost $64.95, and I don't think I can spend that for just 18 sounds. If anyone has any more questions about this demo, feel free to ask. Their address follows: PSL Productions P.O. Box 602 Station K Montreal, Quebec CANADA H1N 3R2 Tel:(514) 256-7936 Telex: 055-61811 MGMSECT Fax: (514) 866-0518 For demo cassette, disk, and sound sheet send $8 (or I'll copy them for you if you want) Soundsations Digital Sample Cassettes These are cassettes they have actual recordings of samples from certain instruments. They currently have 7 volumes, all around $29 (They were $25 when I bought mine). I got volume 7, which has 500+ Proteus sounds. Of course 500+ includes multisamples, there are actually around 100 sounds (still plenty!). Each sound is divided into 3-11 multisamples, with the average being 7. They are place on C and G in a decending order. The sound quality is quite good and you can choose your noise reduction (Dolby B, C or. The sounds range from basses and plucks to choirs and pianos, other cassettes have percussion. The quality of the sampling depends are your equipment and skill. So far my major problem has been succesful looping. I only have the built in software of the S50, so I am sort of handicapped. The other problem is that some multisamples don't go together very well. This is a problem that is inherent in the source sound, and I can't think of much I can do but bear with it. This is the case on only some sounds, others go together wonderfully. I neglected to say but each sample is held for about 4 sec. For only $25 I sure have got a lot of source material, and also I can live with the negative aspects (not having control over the source sound, and the fact that my samples are second generations). All in all it's something for those who have time to sample. There are several steps to getting them to sound good such as choosing which multisamples to use, tone programing, patch programming etc.... Soundsations 370 MT. Vernon Grosse Pointe Farms Michigan, 48236 (313) 885-1539 And again, if you have any questions about this tape, just send a note. neil -- Date: Wed, 18 Apr 90 15:10:45 -0400 (EDT) >From: Neil Anthony Herzinger To: Sgroup Subject: It works! The interactive S-series group is now installed. Mail sent to the group's address will be automatically delivered to all members on the mailing list. Send all messages to: sgroup+@andrew.cmu.edu Send anything else (subscriber info etc...) to me directly at: nh0n+@andrew.cmu.edu neil -- Date: Sat, 21 Apr 90 04:36:30 -0400 (EDT) >From: Neil Anthony Herzinger To: Sgroup Subject: New Members Well since I posted I've added 8 new people to the list. That brings our total population to 22 people. I'd like to welcome those of you who are new and I hope you get something out of this. I've kept a non-interactive mailing list for about two months now. The topics of discussion have been pretty wide. Making this interactive should improve things greatly. The address to send all messages to is: sgroup+@andrew.cmu.edu Anything dealing with subscriptions or the like should be sent directly to me at: nh0n+@andrew.cmu.edu neil -- Date: Mon, 23 Apr 90 17:01:50 -0400 (EDT) >From: Neil Anthony Herzinger To: Sgroup Subject: Sound Library Now that we're properly netwerk'd.... What does everyone thing of a user sound library? It's been suggested that it be kept in S550 native format to save all patch data. Unfortunatly I only have an S50 so I can't host the library. Do we have any volunteers? I have a good bit of my own samples from found objects, dialog, and other instruments, and I'm sure others do as well. So if you're into sharing your own sounds and getting a bunch more (that you can use or throw away freely) give us some feedback. The only costs involved would be postage and buying your own blank disks. You could just donate some sounds and include enough blank disks for the other sounds present. It seems simple enough, we just need someone to be the librarian. (I would be happy to do it but as I said only in S50 format). So who has both an S550 and S50???? neil -- Date: Mon, 23 Apr 90 16:55:57 -0500 >From: Gary Murakami To: nh0n+@andrew.cmu.edu Subject: Re: Sound Library It appears that the laster OS's for the S-550 can write disks in S-50 form. Maybe newer OS's for the S-50 can write disks in S-550 form too? There's still the problem that patches 21-28 will be lost to the S-50 owner, or has Roland changed this in a new software release too? It seems that we should look into the latest S-50 software ASAP to see what features it has. -Gary -- >From: paul@ATHENA.MIT.EDU Date: Tue, 24 Apr 90 09:00:48 -0400 To: sgroup+@andrew.cmu.edu Subject: Re: Sound Library A suggestion: What about a simple catalogue listing of who has what available, so that people who want sounds or disks can agree to terms of transfer among themselves? The ideas of a standardized format or implied obligations on one person to distribute on demand seem unnecessarily centralized to me. Of course if someone really *did* want to be tagged as a librarian, I would gladly mail a few disks over, but I think that maintaining a simple list and leaving terms and chores of transfer to individuals to arrange between themselves would be much easier and would avoid the dead ends of a librarian with a mounting queue of demands for disks to be copied and mailed with different special instructions for each, or a scattered mob of frustrated musicians unequipped to ftp files in reverse polish uuencoded sysex from a central repository on an unreachable network. A library would be a lot of work to build and would generate a nonlinear workload for its maintainer; a catalogue would be much simpler and linear, leaving the transfer work distributed among vested interests. -Paul -- Date: Tue, 24 Apr 90 10:14:09 -0500 >From: Gary Murakami To: paul@athena.mit.edu, sgroup+@andrew.cmu.edu Subject: Re: Sound Library The CD-ROMs help to assemble the library -- the Roland L-CD1 disk contains essentially all of the Roland Sound Bank except the newest 5505 #1-10 and 5506 #1-10 floppies (any other new sound banks?). How many other good freely distributable floppies are there? Whether the number is small or not, it might be a good idea to have someone coordinate the list of who has what even if there isn't a librarian to volunteer for distribution. -Gary -- >From: Neil Anthony Herzinger To: Sgroup Subject: PSL D50 Sound Set I got it in the mail today. I'm listening through the sounds now, pretty impressive. I'll list more info later. neil -- Date: Thu, 26 Apr 1990 14:21:40 +0200 >From: Thomas Flemming To: sgroup+@andrew.cmu.edu Subject: Library It seem reasonable to let people agree among themself when swapping sounds. However it would be fun to mail sounds too. I think the best thing to do is using the S-50 as a basis standard.As in my casepostage ,to No(r)way, can take quite some time. The program could be written in basic so it would be transferable to all machines with MIDI-interface. Still I doubt anyone on this group would take on such a task. I`ve planned to buy the Avalon sample editing program for the ST (still haven't managed to get a pirat version). The files made by this program should be easily converted to ASCII. Thomas Flemming, Oslo 26.04.90 -- Date: Sat, 28 Apr 90 21:04:33 -0400 (EDT) >From: Neil Anthony Herzinger To: Sgroup Subject: D50 sounds I've been listening through them, most sounds are quite impressive. They cover a wide range of D50 sounds, and only 1 or 2 are really 'gimmicky' and unuseable. Each disk has 6-8 sounds, and all but a couple are single sampled (one sample streched over the entire board). This is not as bad as you would expect, the samples really take the range well. Also each disk has a sample for each patch. Only the first disk combines different samples to get certain patches (one being the overused 'Digital Native Dance' sound). I do have some problems with the sounds. Some don't have perfect loop points and there is a slight clicking. It's not extreme in any case, but it is annoying on some sounds. The single sample layout bugs me a little as some samples run out of range and there is blank space on the keyboard. But again these problems are only on a few of the sounds. I am overall very impressed with PSL productions. If only they would fix up the horrible demo tape. Oh well.... PSL Productions D50 sound set $63 for 10 disks (a great price compared to other 3rd parties..) 64 sounds overall If anybody wants more info on the sounds, drop me a note. neil