David,
ok., I appologize... I didn't understand you, as well...;-)
and I appreciate the length of your answer - kind of being taken seriously...
but... until Finale 2006 you couldn't even set panorama to a sound.
And that's much in a midi file. I would recommend to export a midi
file from Finale to, say, Cubase. Take piano sounds. Even edirol's
(Roland's) super quartet has much better piano sounds than a sound
card, and the grand is .... grand.
Take strings... Halion strings is way better than anything you can
get out of your old soundcard. Ok it costs somewhat. OK you have to
tweak a bit. But other than hiring real players it will give you a
much more satisfying experience.
Using Midi Files. OK, you will get a certain impression of the music,
but you are right, many soundcards will even do a worse job... Even
if I must say Window's softsynth will do better than most soundcards...
You can tweak midi files to sound ok. But you cannot do this in Finale.
I even had a turtle beach soundcard about 10 years ago. Payed about
a 1000 $, too. I dumped it since there were (never, not some years
later) no drivers to get it to run up to the factory specifics, and
without crashing...:-(
But... On a halfway adequate computer, be it Apple or Windows, you
WILL get much better sounds if you know how to do it...
Even the 2006 Native Instruments sounds sound much better, and you
can tweak panorama and reverb, but since there is no official way to
save them as a wav or aiff or mp3...
I think you mean well. I also think I was rude to say you were behind
the time but - if you will have a decent mp3 playback there are
things that matter a lot more than the difference between 128 kb and 192 kb....
Kurt
At 23:24 26.09.2005, you wrote:
On 26 Sep 2005 at 22:29, Kurt Gnos wrote:
> And, David, I must confirm Lee, you don't have much of a whim of
> knowledge considering manners and modern sound technology and
> certainly don't know what you don't know
You have completely missed the point.
You are more interested in telling me how poor my $150 soundcard is
in comparison to "modern" samples, but I've listened to demos of the
"modern" stuff and for the price and the performance costs, the
emperor has no clothes -- when the move was made away from dedicated
DSPs for sound towards soft synths and processing by the PC's CPU, a
lot was lost, and the reason for it was simply because PC makers were
too damned cheap to spend the money on $25 chips.
The results leave me underwhelmed in terms of sound quality.
And from where I sit, the whole industry made a huge wrong turn
sometime around 2000 or so.
I don't by any stretch of the imagination consider my soundcard's
sounds to be musically satisfactory -- they are obviously not -- but
if I compare its solo strings to the basic sound of a lot of the soft
synth solo strings available in the sample sets, I don't think it
comes out too poorly. And it does not require a multi-GHz CPU and
gigabytes of RAM. Indeed, it worked just fine in my P120 with 128MBs
of RAM until a few years ago. I was even able to record to WAV files
on that machine.
None of the "modern" sound solutions have anything like that kind of
efficiency. Yes, the soundfont approach can give you much more
flexibility of different samples for different musical purposes, but
at the cost of making your MIDI files 100% tied to that sound sample.
If you're producing only WAV-based output, that's not really an
issue, but I still believe in distributing a general MIDI file. Given
that no synthesized sound is ever going to be as good as real
musicians, I'm unsure that the time it takes to get the better
results with the more advanced soundfonts is worth the time and
effort.
I'm producing the MIDI files and the MP3s not as any kind of
substitute for actual performances, but as a way to get some kind of
idea of what the music might sound like. There's a lot that can be
learned from listening to those files that can't easily be learned by
studying a score.
There's also a lot that I learn in producing the MIDI performances,
however rudimentary they may be musically speaking (and however
inferior they obviously are to performances by real musicians), that
ends up informing the decisions I make in editing the music. Most of
the sources I work from are problematic (or even defective) in one
way or the other, having both errors or inconsistencies in the text,
and those "defects" and inconsistencies need to be resolved in any
edition that's going to be used successfully for a live performance.
Figuring out how to get a rudimentary MIDI performance helps me
figure out where I need to add editorial marks, like dynamics,
articulations, bowings, etc., and it's the process of producing a
MIDI performance that allows me to do that.
You or someone else might spend a lot more time or use completely
different tools than I do, and the results would be different. But,
likewise, if you were performing it with live musicians, the results
would also be different from a performance that I would be involved
in. My MIDI files are like rough sight-reading sessions, whereas
yours may be more like performances that result from hours of
rehearsal.
That's fine -- you have different aims. I'm just trying to get a
whole lot of music into performable condition, and attempting along
the way to add enough life to the MIDI output that you can get a bit
of a clue about the musical content, at least enough to tell if the
piece of music is interesting or not.
>From where I sit, all MIDI performances, no matter how elaborate your
sound setup, are completely unacceptable as a replacement for even a
half-assed live performance (Hi, Dennis!). There is so much that even
amateur musicians do (consciously or not) that is almost impossible
to get into a MIDI file generated from Finale (if you're inputting
the MIDI directly into a sequencer, you can do things that output
from Finale's notation cannot do as well), even using Human Playback
(which I don't have, as I'm using Finale 2003). So, you're basically
comparing one very imperfect facsimile of the music to another
facsimile, made with less versatile tools.
That's why in my original post I allowed that perhaps given that it
was a rudimentary synthesized performance using not-very-realistic
string sounds that the difference between 192K and 128K was not
really relevant, as either was wholly inadequate compared to even
poor quality live recordings. I don't know if we agree on that,
because you seem to be arguing that my soundcard and my sequencing
are both so awful in comparison to the results one can get from
"modern" sound samples and sequencers that it doesn't make a
difference, and that if I *were* using the newer stuff, it *would*
make a difference.
Well, I beg to differ.
And I don't think it's helpful to criticize when you aren't
accounting for the reasons why I prepare my files the way I do. The
only reason I am putting up the MP3s is that I've discovered that the
substantial majority of people out there have PCs whose MIDI sounds
are vastly inferior to the sounds I'm accustomed to. If I thought
that playing the MIDI files directly would get a better result than
I'm hearing, I'd not bother with the MP3s, but I know that's simply
not the case. Most PC soundcards are wavetable-based, or the systems
depend on soft synths (QuickTime and the Microsoft soft synth), and
all of those are COMPLETELY INADEQUATE, even moreso than the sounds I
get from my own soundcard. I've heard them -- they are all dreadful,
in many cases, hardly better than the old days of FM synthesis.
If I had better sound output, I'd be thrilled. And it's also true
that I could actually do a lot more work to tweak the output from my
own soundcard (there are a lot of different options for the samples I
do have, and I also actually have two hardware synths available, the
one in the MP3s I posted, and another one that is more appropriate to
popular music, though it does have better-sounding brass
instruments), but the MIDI performances are means to an end, not an
end in themselves, so I don't see it being worth the extra effort.
Also, as I said, I want to keep my MIDI files vanilla GM so that
those with low bandwidth (or better basic samples than my soundcard)
can still hear something reasonable. I certainly lack the time to
create one GM MIDI file and one that is tied to my particular sound
card -- there's just way too much music for me to get through to be
able to manage that.
Anyway, I've gone on too long answering a post I intended to ignore
in the first place.
But I feel there's an awful lot of assumptions behind the criticism
levelled at me that are completely off base. And I wanted to clarify
that.
--
David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc
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