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


GUS Musician's Digest       Fri, 8 Apr 94 15:27 PST      Volume 6: Issue   8  

Today's Topics:
                           Cakewalk Patches
                   Custom patches - program needed!
                             Encarta MIDs
                          GUS midi problems
                          more patch caching
                    Patch caching and MIDI Mapper
                     to people who upload to epas

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.

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

Date: Fri, 8 Apr 1994 09:51:42 -0500 (CDT)
From: vic@cd.com (Vic Serbe x237)
Subject: Re: Cakewalk Patches

Handle Head Messiah writes:
> 
> 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.

The current version is 2.0, and supports patch caching via a menu
item.  You select a new patch from within the track editor, and then
select "update patch caches" from the "real time" menu.  The GUS gets
updated, and viola, the sequence sounds fine.  Also, on open, the
program is smart enough to initialize your patches to match the
sequence as necessary

I works quite well.  I know a guy with GUS and some external MIDI
modules, one of which is also GM, which is an excellent setup for the
"home brew composer".  He uses CWPfW 2.0 (as I do when I'm over at his
studio) and we both love it.

Cakewalk Pro Windows can be found in several places, even though not many
places advertise it (kinda' specialized and low volume).  The best price
I've seen on it is about $230 US.

I haven't bought it yet, but I definitely will be soon.

-- 
         _._	Vic Serbe (vic@cd.com), Applications Engineer
#####> -------	Central Data Corp. - Makers of the scsiTerminal Server
 //___/ /	1602 Newton Dr., Champaign, IL 61821
 ------*	800/482-0315 or (+1) 217/359-8010 (FAX-6904)

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

Date: Fri, 8 Apr 1994 13:37:23 +0200 (METDST)
From: "Knut A. Vedaa" <el113@bih.no>
Subject: Custom patches - program needed!

I've been thinking a bit about the problem of using your own patches on
GUS with Cakewalk or whichever sequencer you're using. Since 1) you can
not use patches from more than one bank at a time, and 2) Cakewalk does
not allow you to choose which bank to load from, the best solution would 
be:

A very simple program which:
	1) Execute the command "copy <selected_file_name> ULTRASND.INI"
	2) Forces the driver to reread ULTRASND.INI (as described in one
	   of the latest digests)

It could pop up a window where you could choose among various ini-files
that you've created. The absolute best way is to make it a DLL, so you can
use it from CAL. What do you think? This program should not be difficult
at all to make, but as I have very little knowledge of Windows
programming, I hoped one of you would program it.

Knut Arne Vedaa.

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

Date: Fri, 08 Apr 1994 13:47:04 GMT
From: Clarke Brunt <CLARKE@lsl.co.uk>
Subject: Encarta MIDs

I just got Encarta '94 yesterday (MicroSoft Multimedia Encyclopaedia
on CD-ROM if you don't know). I see that it has quite a lot of
MIDs on it - mainly the National Anthems of the World.

When I first played a few of these (being MicroSoft, all output
goes via MIDI-Mapper), the tunes were accompanied by what I
describe as a 'low-pitched grunging noise' which I tracked
down to being due to percussion scored on channel 16 being
played on Acoustic Piano!

It turns out that, like canyon.mid that comes with Windows, these
MIDs are scored for either base or extended MIDI, so you can
play them either on channels 13-16 with perc on 16, or 1-10 with
perc on 10, but preferably not with ALL the channels enabled
at once. There is very little documentation about this with
Encarta - I saw the suggestion to select Adlib setup in
MIDI-Mapper (this is a channel 13-16 setup). I added such
a setup to the UltraSound midimap.cfg, with channel 16 vectored
onto channel 10, but then found that patch caching didn't work.
Just activating channels 1-10 was better - at least the caching
works. Has anyone else played around with these Encarta MIDs?

While experimenting, I found another of these anthems sounded
rather strange (unfortunately I don't know whose anthem it is -
the MID just has a nonsense name so I'll have to play all the
anthems from within Encarta until I find it). It features
glockenspiel, strings, and percussion. The glock sounds as though
is is playing two bars ahead of everything else. Also, the glock
channel had two program changes at time 0 - one for glock and the
other for strings - the MicroSoft stuff plays glock, while
WinJammer and CakeWalk play strings (the second program change of
the two), so it looks like some of these MIDs haven't been
tested too well.

No problems however with the videos and animations with sound - all
seemed to play OK. The .wav sounds hiss a little though, presumably
8-bit data.

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

Date: Fri, 8 Apr 94 13:05:36 BST
From: cb@jet.uk (craige bevil)
Subject: GUS midi problems

	I'm having problems using the MIDI input on the GUS. The midi
output and the joystick work correctly using the adapter cable I
bought but I can't for the life of me manage to use my external synths
as a midi source. I tried both Patchman (I assume you can play the
voices you load into the GUS via a midi keyboard) and cakewalk and
neither seemed to respond to any input. Boo Hoo. Has anybody got any
suggestions. I suspect the cable may be at fault but I havent got a
clue how to test it. 

Please e-mail me any replies,

Craige

*********************************************************
*Craige Bevil | Joint European Torus | email: cb@jet.uk *
*-------------------------------------------------------*
*                                                       *
*	"Hartlepool, a monkey hanger's paradise"        *
*                                                       *
*********************************************************

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

Date: Fri, 8 Apr 94 11:29:11 EDT
From: echen@verdi.sra.com (Eugene Chen)
Subject: more patch caching

I may be confused. In fact, yes I am.
I have found using MPB that only one bank
is active at a time (across the 16 channels), but what's more
only one patch is active at a time.  Is MPB then just meant
to BROWSE patches, not really to load multiple ones for use in a song?

In general, it's been a bit a long road, trying to integrate
the GUS into a useable state to make music.  Perhaps, people
could offer examples of their configuration.  
IE what's in their ultrasnd.ini/*.ins files, do they have different
banks for different songs, or different *ini files, how do they
organize patches on disk, what patch numbering 
scheme they follow and what software they
run when sequencing, ie how do they get those patches cached?

thanks,
an eager and not-quite-but-almost productive GUS owner

PS. unrelated: how are patches >256 (for instance the bosendorfer)
created? is there yet another piece of shareware i should download?
(sorry starting to sound a bit ungrateful there, letting
some frustration show :) )

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

Date: Fri, 08 Apr 1994 13:32:00 GMT
From: Clarke Brunt <CLARKE@lsl.co.uk>
Subject: Patch caching and MIDI Mapper

I said yesterday that I thought MIDI Mapper handled patch caching
correctly, but now I'm not so sure. In particular, if you use
a MIDI Mapper setup which re-routes channel 16 onto channel 10,
because you have a MID with percussion on 16, then it seems that
caching does not work correctly.

It has just occurred to me while writing that this may be because
the sequencer program works out all the notes used on channel 10
and calls MidiOutCacheDrumPatches with them - if the percussion
is actually on 16, then this will be no use at all. Do any of the
well known sequencers have options for specifying which channel the
percussion is on?

I can continue to investigate the implications of MIDI Mapper on
patch caching - even more complicated if a KeyMap is in use to map
one percussion instrument onto another - but I just wondered if
someone knows the answers already.

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

Date: Fri, 8 Apr 94 14:43:35 FST
From: tblanchot@VNET.IBM.COM
Subject: to people who upload to epas

To all the people who upload new files to epas:
Could you please put a file_id.diz description file in all the
uploaded archive files? This makes life much easier for SysOps
because all the BBS programs have tools to automatically import
the file_id.diz descriptions into their file lists... It saves a
lot of time, and file_id.diz is a standard now.
The file must describe the contents and purpose of the files included
in the archive, in a few lines and not more than 44 columns..
Thanks.

***********************************************************************
* Thierry BLANCHOT tblanchot@vnet.ibm.com     MUSIC POWER BBS SysOp   *
*    GUS support, Modules, Midifiles, Modcharts Distribution site     *
*          Shareware Zone - Dos - Win - OS/2 - DOOM corner            *
* CALL (+33)88.83.63.59 - France - 2400 -> ZyXEL 16k8  Online 24h/day *
***********************************************************************

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

End of GUS Musician's Digest V6 #8
**********************************

To post to tomorrow's digest:                        <gus-music@mail.orst.edu>
To (un)subscribe or get help:                <gus-music-request@mail.orst.edu>
To contact a human (last resort):              <gus-music-owner@mail.orst.edu>

FTP Sites              Archive                       Directories
---------              -------                       -----------
Main N.American Site:  archive.orst.edu              pub/packages/gravis
                       wuarchive.wustl.edu           systems/ibmpc/ultrasound
Main Asian Site:       nctuccca.edu.tw               PC/ultrasound
European Callers ONLY: theoris.rz.uni-konstanz.de    pub/sound/gus
Submissions:           archive.epas.utoronto.ca      pub/pc/ultrasound/submit
Newly Validated Files: archive.epas.utoronto.ca      pub/pc/ultrasound
Mirrors:               garbo.uwasa.fi                mirror/ultrasound
 
MailServer For Archive Access: Email to <mail-server@nike.rz.uni-konstanz.de>

Hints:
      - Get the FAQ from the FTP sites or the request server.
      - Mail to <gus-music-request@mail.orst.edu> for info about other
	GUS related mailing lists (general use, programmers, etc.).



