Apparently-To: john.smith@gravis.com


GUS Musician's Digest       Thu, 7 Apr 94 15:46 PST      Volume 6: Issue   7  

Today's Topics:
                           Cakewalk Patches
                 GUS Musician's Digest V6 #6 (2 msgs)
                  Question about using cutom patches

Standard Info:
	- Meta-info about the GUS can be found at the end of the Digest.
	- Before you ask a question, please READ THE FAQ.

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Date: Wed, 6 Apr 94 19:23:03 -0700
From: jdawes@sdcc13.ucsd.edu (Handle Head Messiah)
Subject: Cakewalk Patches

Hello all,

	I've been reading the digest lately, and have noticed a lot of mention about "Patch Caching" in Cakewalk pro ( Windows? ). Can someone guide me in the right direction about where to find some documentation on this?  Or better yet wehere to find it in the sequencer.  What version is Cakewalk, too.  

Thanks,

John Dawes

jdawes@sdcc13.ucsd.edu

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Date: Wed, 6 Apr 1994 18:02:03 -0700 (PDT)
From: Rath <cllym@ucdavis.edu>
Subject: Re: GUS Musician's Digest V6 #6

RE: Piano sounds

TO the owner of the Yamaha PSR 500.. You said that the patch is far 
superior to the GUS patch, eh?

That's not saying much, since I've heard the PSR500 many times, and the 
pinao patch on it basically sucks..

Rath

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Date: Wed, 6 Apr 1994 22:54:02 -0700 (PDT)
From: Don Munsil <dmunsil@netcom.com>
Subject: Re: GUS Musician's Digest V6 #6

> I've just acquired a Roland Juno-106 to hook up to the GUS, which  
> sounds great on its own, but when I record and play back via MIDI I get 
> some notes missed and some stuck on.

I have a Juno-106, attached via an Aztech Labs MIDI cable (a great 
bargain, BTW, and works fine). About the only thing to worry about with 
the Juno, as far as I know, is that if you have the MIDI send switch set 
to III, the Juno sends the whole patch definition as a SYSEX message 
every time you change patches, and this can bog down the sequencer.

Oh yes, and when you release all the keys, the Juno sends an ALL NOTES 
OFF message (Controller 123, level 0, I believe), which can cut off notes 
prematurely on the GUS, and generally bogs down the GUS drivers. Every 
once in a while, I just do a cut operation (In Powertracks Pro, my 
sequencer of choice), with the filter set to that particular controller.

The Juno has one of the earliest MIDI implementations, so thank your 
lucky stars that it still works at all. What a standard!

--Don

 -----------------------------------------------------
Don Munsil          | I respect faith, but doubt is
dmunsil@netcom.com  | what gets you an education.
don@elseware.com    |                 -- Wilson Mizner

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Date: Thu, 7 Apr 94 20:06:54 +0200
From: f93-maj@nada.kth.se
Subject: Re: Question about using cutom patches

>>Greetings, fellow musicians. I am using my dear little GUS as an additional
>>synth module to my other stuff and have the following question.
>>   How can I use custom patches using MIDIFIER? I tried using windows but
>>   restarting windows everytime really sucks and since I don't use Cakewalk
>>   I can't get the bankswitching working. So if there's a solution to my
>>   problem I'd be thankful.

>You can avoid the problem of restarting Windows by using MIDI Patch Browser
>(MPB).  I have a custom bank set as bank 0, and moved the General MIDI set
>over to 1.  If you switch from bank 0 to bank 1 and then back in MPB, any
>changes in ultrasnd.ini will be read in just as if you had restarted
>windows... apparently MPB can reset the windows ultrasound driver.  It makes
>changing patches on the fly MUCH easier.
>
>Question for any of you who might know this: does the current driver only hold
>one bank at a time?  If it did this would explain how MPB works.  I assume the
>driver needs to access the .ini file whenever it gets the patches for a new
>bank.

Since i wrote MPB I might be able to answer...

Yes you're right, the current driver only supports one bank, sort of...
When caching a set of patches all 'old' patches in RAM are flushed, and you
can only cache from one bank at a time. However trying to cache a patch that
doesn't exist in the indicated bank will default to bank 0 so you can actually
use 2 banks but that's a bit cumbersome...
Actually I see nothing in the midiOutCachePatches spec. that sais that it
should flush the old patches (and thus make it impossible to use patches from
multiple banks), especially since there's a special uncache function...
I hope they'll change this in future drivers.

Anyway, when using the disk browser function in MPB it:
1) Edits ULTRASND.INI to contain a bank (no n) with path and filename of the
   patch to load.
2) Cache a patch from another bank than n (a very small one for speed).
3) Cache the patch from bank n..
   If you don't do step 2. the drivers won't reread the ULTRASND.INI the next
   time you cache anything from bank n.
4) Ev. restore ULTRASND.INI as it was before.

Actually I also use a step 0) Uncache previously loaded patch(es) altough the
current drivers ignore it, one might hope that Gravis'll change this in the
future and support 'incremental' patch caching.


/F. Markus J.

------------------------------

End of GUS Musician's Digest V6 #7
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