Ultrasound Daily Digest     Fri Aug  6 00:07     Volume 5: Issue   5  

Today's Topics:
							   Catch-22
				   DIGEST ADMIN: REPETITIVE DIGESTS
							 grand piano
						 MIDI connector box.
							MT-32 & MEGAEM
						Piano patch, midi etc.
				 Pinball Dreams and SBOS - Not good.
	PUPDATE.EXE runs very slowly, but appears to work okay for me.
					  responses from readers...
						  Spectrum Analyser
						   Surplus Digests
					Ultrasound Daily Digest V5 #4
						Windows startup delay

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: Thu, 5 Aug 93 06:07:27 PDT
From: deraud@power.amasd.anatcp.rockwell.com (Robert Lee DeRaud)
Subject: Catch-22
Message-ID: <9308051307.AA12451@power.amasd.anatcp.rockwell.com>

Seems like we're suffering through a spell of mail-server recursivitis. I'm
starting to feel like Yossarian: "I see everything twice!"

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

Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1993 12:02:43 -0600 (CDT)
From: ddebry@grue.dsd.ES.COM (Dave DeBry)
Subject: DIGEST ADMIN: REPETITIVE DIGESTS
Message-ID: <9308051802.AA16275@grue>

	I'm not really here.

	However, I *think* I've fixed the recursive digest problem.
I'll keep checking to make sure it doesn't happen anymore.  (Say
goodbye to any hopes I had of a keyboard-free week. :)  And to the
users who caused this because of their defective mailers, a great big
raspberry from all of us.

	Oh, BTW: There are GUS boards being used in displays here at
SIGGRAPH!  Color me impressed!

-- 
Dave  ddebry@ debry@   \ 
DeBry dsd.    peruvian. | "A jar of eyes can be a tasty treat."
	  es.     cs.utah.  |
	  com     edu      /  

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

Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1993 10:28:06 -0500 (CDT)
From: David Britton <fishead@cwis.unomaha.edu>
Subject: Re: grand piano
Message-ID: <9308051528.AA28295@cwis.unomaha.edu>

I'm going to assume that the patch you're referring to is the MIDI grand 
piano patch.  If it is, you're disappointment in the quality of the sample
is understandable, considering that those patches are created using synthesis
and not sampling.  You'll find that sampling any instrument with some degree
of accuracy takes about 4 or 5 sampled notes from the instrument at different
ranges (i.e. octaves) accross the 88 note spectrum.  It'd be nice if the gus
did sampling like that with all the control of a MIDI patch, but the tech.
required pushes sampling keyboards upwards of $6000.  My suggestion to you 
is if you want a good piano, buy the Proformance (I believe it's by EMu) for
about $500.  It's a sound module that has sampled about 8 piano's.  Of course,
then you'd have to build or buy the MIDI adapter for the GUS...

** David L. Britton                **I love a good fight with my computer! **
** University of Nebraska          ** I have no opinions to express, only  **
** fishead@cwis.unomaha.edu        **               TRUTHS!                **
** I am the Lemon Merchant         **   Don't blame me, I voted for Bush   **

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

Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1993 18:50:11 -0400
From: "M.C. Ng" <mcng@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca>
Subject: MIDI connector box.
Message-ID: <93Aug5.185022edt.43252-2@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca>

Anyone recieve their MIDI connector yet??   I've been waiting for 3 weeks and I was hoping to play with it before School.   I hope this is NOT another stall..
I can tolerate it once... but not twice...  

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

Date: Thu, 05 Aug 93 19:06:25 MESZ
From: SGREENWO@mhs.novell.de (Scott Greenwood)
Subject: MT-32 & MEGAEM
Message-ID: <30C0543B019D4FD9@MHS.novell.de>

Hi,
	 I tried the MegaEm MT-32 emulator for the GUS, I found a few 
problems with using dr.-DOS, these were generally memory orientated. 
After running it through an ICE (in circuit emulator) I found that it 
seems to be looking for specific memory managers QEMM, 386MAX etc. so it 
can patch them (WHY ???).
	 I tried E-mailing the author of MegaEm with a report of this but I 
got no response, does anyone know how MegaEm works or how to get in 
contact with Jayeson Lee-Steere? If so could you e-mail me or post it 
here.

							  Thanks   
										Scott.
 
:-)     

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

Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1993 13:35:45 -0400
From: jericho!gord (Gord Wait S-MOS Systems Vancouver Design Center)
Subject: Piano patch, midi etc.
Message-ID: <9308051735.AA17459@smos.bc.ca>

Re: Grand Piano Realism: Seems to my ear the biggest problem with
the piano patch is that it doesn't sustain long enough. I don't know
if it could be made longer, or if it already uses up the full amount
of ram it's allowed to. 

I have noticed that a few of the patches show tonal 'jumps' when playing 
a chromatic scale, which shows that there are not quite enough samples for
the instrument. I don't complain at the price of the gus. If it was a Fairlight,
sure I'd complain..

RE: Midi mapper setups: the New 2.06 drivers include midi mapper setups
that preload a lower quality GM patch set into ram so that apps that
don't cache patches don't have to. So this could be a reason for a windows
startup delay..

Here is a problem I have found (minor one): It seems that the drivers pay no
attention to midi note off commands when it comes to percussion instruments.
I was trying to get a cut off crash cymbal sound (like when a live drummer
hits the crash, and then grabs the cymbal to stop it for a punch effect). No matter
what I set the duration to, the crash cymbal patch plays all the way through. 
My yamaha drum machine has an option to ignore the note off commands in case the midi
source is always sending short midi notes, but I can turn it off. 
I guess I'll have to try to get a crash cymbal patch loaded into a "normal" midi
channel and see if I can make it work. Anyone have any ideas on how to get
at the cymbal patch? For that matter, how does the drum channel work compared to
an ordinary midi channel??

Finally, I have a midi file: "Dust in the Wind" by Kansas that I sequenced using
PowerChords, and finished off in Winjammer. Can I email it to someone with ftp
access to upload it to the archive for me? It's not a full mega instrument 
file like some of the others out there(the song is pretty minimal)
 but the violin solo came out pretty good on the gus..

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

Date: Thu, 05 Aug 93 20:43:01  GMT
From: Mike Parkins <mike@kingpin.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Pinball Dreams and SBOS - Not good.
Message-ID: <744608581snx@kingpin.demon.co.uk>

SBOS (1.20 to 2.10 tried) doesn't work very well with Pinball Dreams.
Even on my DX2-66 it slows the game down to an unacceptable speed
and the audio is extremely quiet and distorted. I have gone back
to using the PC speaker during play.

Anyone got it to work better?

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

Date: Thu, 5 Aug 93 8:47:58 CDT
From: ibmpa!hartmann.austin.ibm.com!lance@ibminet.awdpa.ibm.com (Lance Hartmann)
Subject: PUPDATE.EXE runs very slowly, but appears to work okay for me.
Message-ID: <9308051347.AA15259@hartmann.austin.ibm.com>

Previously:

>+ Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1993 08:18:17 +0800 (SST)
>+ From: none <isc26206@leonis.nus.sg>
>+ Subject: Is there anything wrong with the PUPDATE.EXE file in GUSAIL10.ZIP
>+ Message-ID: <Pine.3.07.9308050817.B25177-9100000@leonis.nus.sg>
> 
> hi
> 
>   When I tried to update my .pat files using the pupdate.exe file,
> error messages were displayed stating files not found. After running
> the file, all my .pat files became .pa1 files and there isn't any .pat
> files (updated by pupdate.exe) in my directory. Hope you could enlighten
> me on this subject. Thanks


The only thing I noticed when running PUPDATE.EXE was that it took a
looooooooong time to run (and, I have a 486/50 [true DX] with 20MB of RAM)!
Aside from the lengthy run time, all appears to have worked properly.

> 
> Directory of pupdate.exe file is d:\gus\ail\pupdate.exe
> Directory of .pat files is c:\ultrasnd\midi\*.pat

I don't have the README before me as I type this, but you might want
to review it carefully to see if there are/were any restrictions with
regard to the directory from which you run PUPDATE.EXE.  I cannot
recall the directory from which I ran it, but I do believe it was
on the same drive (C:) as my "ultrasnd" directory.  Nonetheless, I
do remember verifying that my ULTRADIR environment variable DID
include the drive letter (C:).

--
Lance Hartmann (lance%hartmann.austin.ibm.com@ibmpa.awdpa.ibm.com)
			   Yes, that IS a '%' (percent sign) in my network address.
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
All statements, comments, opinions, etc. herein reflect those of the author
and shall NOT be misconstrued as those of IBM or anyone else for that matter.

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

Date: Thu, 5 Aug 93 9:49:15 EDT
From: gregg@hechcx.mkt.csd.harris.com (Gregg D. Asherman)
Subject: responses from readers...
Message-ID: <9308051349.AA12515@hechcx.mkt.csd.harris.com>

Hi everybody;

	I bet ( hope ) I'm not the only one that feels this way...
yesterdays digest was almost undigestable, why you may ask
It was the longest piece of junk I've seen CLOG the net in a while.

You may ask, Who's at fault?  well it may be you!!!

please don't respond to the digest unless you can separate the one or two
mail messages you wish to respond to from the large volume of others.

The whole file gets sent back to be included tommorrow, including your
meager changes/hints/etc. so now the file is 2 times larger, and how many 
people have done this recently...( TOO Many ).  This makes the reading
boring and redundant.

Need I say more. No I didn't think so
	Please be more careful in the future
	(read this as learn vi/emacs and elm/mail/mailx/tin etc....)

talk to you all soon
	Gregg

P.S. flames will be considered wasted net bandwith and ignored :>)

-- 
+-------------------------------------------+
| Gregg Asherman    (305)977-5604 work  |
|                       |
| gregg@hrshcx.mkt.csd.harris.com       |
| gregg@hechcx.mkt.csd.harris.com           |
+-------------------------------------------+

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

Date: Thu, 5 Aug 93 3:49:08 EDT
From: akwong@ccs.carleton.ca (Adrian Kwong)
Subject: Re: Spectrum Analyser
Message-ID: <9308050749.AA27067.27067@alfred.ccs.carleton.ca>

In a previous Digest, Rogan Dawes writes:

> I don't know if this is correct, but Mark Cox, the guy who wrote ModPlay,
> and various other sound programs claims to have a genuine analyser
> in one of his programs that I have.
> 
> Naturally, the time taken would depend on the resolution of the sound,
> he was just playing MODs
> 
> I can look up the exact text, but I think that was what he claimed.

Actually, the spectrum analyser is fairly simple to do considering
that you don't really have to "think" about doing much, its just that
you're going to need a little horsepower to get it done.

If one was to use the computer to analyse in realtime an incoming
stream of (just assume) 44.1kHz mono data at 8 bits (lets not get too
fancy), you would have about 1k of data every 23ms.  

What needs to be done is to do a Fourier Transform.  And the algorithm
that is normally used in this situation is the FFT. (Fast Fourier
Xform).   The computer would need to be able to handle doing 43.1
transforms every second.  (Thats just mono)

Double that for Stereo, and Quadruple that for Stereo at 16bits.
Pretty fast computer.  Mark Cox only needed to do an update about
20-30 times a second depending on the sampling rate.  Pretty probable.

Just that, the FFT provides a LINEAR transform on the Frequency output
as opposed to a Logarithmic (which is what we're used to seeing) 
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------
Adrian Kwong         akwong@alfred.ccs.carleton.ca       CIS: 70702,2357
1:163/272@fidonet    akwong@uuisis.isis.org            13:813/101@SBCNet
BBS: (613) 230-1439  Bald Mountain Enterprises        V32B/TPEP/V42B/MNP
	 ... all opinions expressed are mine only blah blah blah ...
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------

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

Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1993 10:27:06 -0400
From: Martin H Rogers <mrogers@afit.af.mil>
Subject: Surplus Digests
Message-ID: <199308051427.AA11133@stealth.afit.af.mil>

This is my first post to the digest, and I'm sorry that it's a negative one.
But I'm tired of getting extra copies of old digests included. It looks like
someone's including the entire digest from a previous day in a reply? Once in
a while I can understand, but I think this is the second day in a row. It's
getting old. Can anything be done to prevent this?

Any flames via email, please.
Martin
mrogers@afit.af.mil

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

Date: Thu, 5 Aug 93 13:38:44 EDT
From: Phat H Tran <ptran@sciborg.uwaterloo.ca>
Subject: Re: Ultrasound Daily Digest V5 #4
Message-ID: <9308051738.AA04684@sciborg.uwaterloo.ca>

> Date: Wed, 04 Aug 93 18:00:41 EDT
> From: Raphael Pungin <IQM221@URIACC.URI.EDU>
> Subject: Annoying exponential velocity responce
> Message-ID: <9308042209.AA09628@orca.es.com>
> 
> I've had the GUS for couple of weeks. I do like its sound quality more
> than my SB PRO. However I am disappointed in one feature of the GUS -
> exponential velocity responce. Although it might be good if you use GUS

The volume response has already been linearized in the latest GUS drivers
and utilities, but Gravis just hasn't bothered to release them until
other things are added and debugged.  But in the meantime, VMAP your .mids,
but don't erase the originals.  

> Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1993 20:43:18 +0300 (EET DST)
> From: pate@clinet.fi (Pasi Haatanen)
> Subject: AVI / MPEG problems with GUS audio output
> Message-ID: <9308041743.AA26089@clinet.fi>
> 
> I was wondering, if anyone has solution to the problem, occuring with MPEG
> animations and sound. The animation goes on smoothly, but the sound just
> cuts all the time.
>

Try putting your GUS on an 8-bit DMA.  This did the trick for me.  (My
GUS works on the 16-bit DMA channels just fine, except when playing AVI's
off my Mitsumi.  The CD-ROM seems to lose its bearings, pauses, and
sometimes stops altogether whenever there are DMA transfers to my GUS
across a 16-bit channel.  And I know I don't have any conflicts.)

> Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1993 08:18:17 +0800 (SST)
> From: none <isc26206@leonis.nus.sg>
> Subject: Is there anything wrong with the PUPDATE.EXE file in GUSAIL10.ZIP
> Message-ID: <Pine.3.07.9308050817.B25177-9100000@leonis.nus.sg>
> 
>   When I tried to update my .pat files using the pupdate.exe file,
> error messages were displayed stating files not found. After running
> the file, all my .pat files became .pa1 files and there isn't any .pat
> files (updated by pupdate.exe) in my directory. Hope you could enlighten
> me on this subject. Thanks
> 
> Directory of pupdate.exe file is d:\gus\ail\pupdate.exe
> Directory of .pat files is c:\ultrasnd\midi\*.pat
>

The output files are probably being written in d:/gus/ail.  Put pupdate.exe 
in your patch directory (c:/ultrasnd/midi) and run it from there.  I haven't
had any problems using the pupdate that came with GUSAIL10.
 
> Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1993 07:49:46 -0600
> From: craigman@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Craig Anderson)
> Subject: Re: Ultrasound Daily Digest V5 #3
> Message-ID: <9308041250.AA04276@casbah.acns.nwu.edu>
> 
> I've just looked at a GUS, and enjoyed it a lot.  However, I have lots of
> questions which the salesperson was unable/unwilling to answer:
> 
>         I'm looking for serious sound editing/sampling capabilities and
> midi sequencing.  I know the GUS doesn't support MIDI scripting, but it
> does play midi sequences, right?
>

The GUS has a Windows driver and DOS programs that will let you play
MIDI sequences.  You can also use Windows sequencers to compose MIDI
files for the GUS, if that's what you meant by "scripting".

>         What is the deal with the sound source?  I know the FAQ says
> something about the wavetables, but (as mentioned in the faq) it's still a
> bit confusing.  The guy at the store was telling me that the 128
> "polyphony" sounds (and the 30-odd percussion sounds) that the GUS has on
> board come from a Roland digitally sampled chip which Roland uses on one of
> their keyboards.  Am I to  understand that the GUS has these samples AND is
> capable of *.wav conversion as well?  
>

The GUS has 128 melodic and 60+ percussive patches.  Each patch contains
one or more samples of an instrument.  The patches were created for the
GUS by Eye & I.  I don't think they stole patches from Roland synths since
that might be a bit illegal.

I'm not sure what you meant by wave conversion.  The GUS can play waves...

>         Is it possible to dump new digitized samples onto my harddrive and
> use them in a sequencing program with GUS (say, from an E-Mu card, DAT, or
> e-prom)?  What type of MUSIC software can I get with the GUS?  i.e. What,
> if anything, comes bundled besides professor panzar, or whatever?
> 

You can turn almost any sample into a patch for the GUS to use if you 
have the appropriate skills and tools.  Unfortunately, the tools are 
crude at the moment, so you'll need a lot of skill.

The GUS comes with two decent MIDI sequencers/composers called PowerChords
and Recording Session.  These are slightly stripped down versions that you
can upgrade to more powerful versions for a fee.  However, as they are,
they can be of great value to the beginning or intermediate MIDI composer.

>         Has Gravis released the 16-bit stereo 44kHz upgrade yet?  Anyone
> try it?  Lastly, If you've had experience with Turtle Beach's snazzy
> expensive crem-de-la-motherboard, how do you think it compares with Gus?
>

The 16-bit daughtercard hasn't been released yet.  It should be soon, 
though.
 
Phat.

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

Date: Thu, 05 Aug 93 13:49:15 EDT
From: pccmoddan@aol.com
Subject: Windows startup delay
Message-ID: <9308051349.tn21483@aol.com>

All -
  The delay is caused (at least partially) by the UltraSound driver verifying
that each patch listed in the ULTRASND.INI file does indeed exist. Move one
of the patches out of the \ULTRASND\MIDI directory and you'll get an error
when you load Windows stating that patch X could not be loaded.

- Dan Nicholson
________________________________________________
| Dan Nicholson | email: pccmoddan@aol.com     |
|  aka          | uuencoded: moddan@bowker.com |
| Maelcum [KLF] | America Online: PCC ModDan   |
|  and          | VirtualNet: 2 @ 9082         |
| [PCC] ModDan  | Voice Phone: (908)687-3479   |
|_______________|______________________________|
|                                              |
|           Levisionet Technologies            |
|           553 Thoreau Terrace                |
|           Union, NJ 07083   U.S.A.           |
|          (Formerly PCkS Associates)          |
|______________________________________________|

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

End of Ultrasound Daily Digest V5 #5
************************************
