On Wed, Jan 28, 2004 at 03:52:38PM -0500, Dominic Genest wrote: > Yes I am familiar with "mod" files which, more precisely, were born in the > Amiga world. Generally speaking, they're best at techno songs. > > Mine are rather "piano only", classical-like, songs. Those usually sound > better with midi sequencers.
I would have to completely disagree. It isn't that one is "better" than the other, they both have pluses and minuses. At a certain level, however, you can achieve roughly the same overall efficiency. A properly coded software synthesizer is by all means more versatile and more likely to make things sound "natural", but on the other hand, this is only if your music (and the synthesizer) take proper advantage of MIDI's "expressive controls". The most important of which is velocity, I'd say. If you don't plan on using any velocity information, you can do the same thing with a good set of samples (~one per octave per instrument) and a tracker as you could with a MIDI synth that uses up around the same amount of system resources. You could also do this with timidity, but I kinda think a tracker would be more intuitive... I mean, timidity isn't exactly a synthesizer, it works pretty much like a tracker as far as I can tell. To find a true "synth" that runs with this much efficiency and sounds just as good as the tracked (or timidity) option, I think it would be easier to find the nice piano samples. Of course, if you're willing to shell out more system resources (mostly processing power) to make your velocity information truly "synthesize" the sounds in an expressive manner, that would certainly sound better. The thing that you (IMHO) want to figure out is if you can sacrifice that processing power and resources, and if a good synth like that even exists... which is why you're asking... but I just thought I'd toss out the tracker/timidity option as a truly viable alternative if you can't find something that sounds better at a reasonable resource level. Cheers, 784 - Michael C. Piantedosi - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
