Ultrasound Daily Digest     Fri,  6 Nov 92       Volume 1 : Issue  11 

Today's Topics:
					 Dammit: Gravis --> Telemart
			 Digest Admin: Added Marc Paulin's MIDI files
							   posting
					  Posting the digest to news
		Questions from a musically-inclined potential buyer...

Digest Address:           ultrasound@dsd.es.com
						  To post to tomorrow's digest.

Request Server Address:   ultrasound-request@dsd.es.com
						  To subscribe, unsubscribe, and request files.

Owner Address:            ultrasound-owner@dsd.es.com
						  To contact a human if the server has troubles.

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

Date: Fri, 6 Nov 92 0:38:32 EET
From: Lasse Hero <larry@mdata.fi>
Message-Id: <199211052238.AA05945@mdata.fi>
Subject: Dammit: Gravis --> Telemart
To: Ultrasound Daily Digest <ultrasound@dsd.es.com>

Gravis seems to be doing exactly the same thing with Telemart that they 
supposedly (?) did with EA.. Telemart was originally promised to receive 
the cards weeks (monts?) ago, but the shipping date has been delayed about
once a week. Well, this time there seems to be even greater delay.
I just received a fax from Telemart (thanks to them, great service so
far) in which they told me that Gravis has delayd again, and they
(Telemart) now expect to get the cards 11-12-92. They also added that
they can't guarantee that even this date will hold true...

Now, does Gravis think someone will really wait that long to get a
sound card? (it might be a really good one, but still)

I hope someone at Gravis sees this and does something similar with 
the situation to what they did with EA (shipping earlier, or did they?).
I'd also like to get a confirmation from Gravis to this December-
shipping date.

P.S. Could it be that the 11-12-92 means November 12 instead of 
	 December 11? I just thought that if maybe possibly the woman
	 at Telemart converted that to "Europe"-format... (see, I'm TRYING
	 to be optimistic)

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

Date: Thu, 5 Nov 92 15:40:02 MST
From: ddebry@itchy (Dave DeBry)
Message-Id: <9211052240.AA15606@itchy>
Subject: Digest Admin: Added Marc Paulin's MIDI files
To: Ultrasound Daily Digest <ultrasound@dsd.es.com>

	I just added Marc Paulin's three MIDI files to the request
server.  (These are the ones he posted to news.)  The request name for
the files is "three-midi".

-- 
Dave  ddebry@ debry@   \ "Wait!" "Can you explain?" "I can explain!"
DeBry dsd.    peruvian. | "This better be good.  They shot you last
	  es.     cs.utah.  | week."
	  com     edu      /         - Dr. Frank N. Furter and Audience

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

Date: Tue, 3 Nov 92 21:26:08 PST
From: mtichy@sfu.ca
Message-Id: <9211040526.AA01203@fraser.sfu.ca>
Subject: posting
To: Ultrasound Daily Digest <ultrasound@dsd.es.com>

> I think you may be asking for it from owners of other cards if you
> do
> this. They'll ask us to keep the mailing list to ourselves
> especially to
> not waste bandwidth. So I don't think this is a good idea.
> return. 
> However, we can do what the PAS people are doing, and that is post
> a
> monthly (or bi monthly) GUS FAQ file.
 
I don't agree with you here.  The UltraSound is a soundcard 
and it's messages have every right to be included in the 
comp.sys.ibm.pc.soundcard forum.  Do the SoundBlaster, Adlib 
or Roland owners keep their posts to themselves?  I don't 
think so.
 
The digest only takes up one message.  If they see it's the 
UltraSound digest they only have to skip one message.
 
I do agree that we need an UltraSound faq that could be posted 
on a monthly basis.
 

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

Date: Thu, 5 Nov 92 18:58:28 MST
From: ddebry@itchy (Dave DeBry)
Message-Id: <9211060158.AA16817@itchy>
Subject: Posting the digest to news
To: Ultrasound Daily Digest <ultrasound@dsd.es.com>

	I would like to see at least part of the digest going news.
There are some problems, however.

	1] People on news who see the digest there will tend to reply
on news, and not to the mailing list.  In effect, we'll miss half the
discussion.  Not only us, but the people at Gravis who "listen in" on
the digest.  The reason this is a useful list is that our complaints
get back to the Creators quickly.

	2] Posting all digests to news encourages talk to move to
news.  The nice thing about a mailing list is that conversations stay
(reasonably) topical.  The people reading and writing are actually
interested in the topic.

	3] Bandwidth isn't a factor in posting to news.  However,
there are sure to be people who will complain loud and long that
everything from a mailing list is going to news, and since mailing
lists exist to be separate from news... you get the picture.  

	I think posting a FAQ once a week to news is a good idea.  The
FAQ could be updated often to include the latest information from the
digest.  Is there anyone who wants to undertake the task?  (Wasn't
there someone out there already working on a FAQ?)

-- 
Dave  ddebry@ debry@   \ "Is this a monster I see before me, with
DeBry dsd.    peruvian. | tentacles instead of hands?  Don't let
	  es.     cs.utah.  | it clutch me!"
	  com     edu      /                        - Captain Tempest

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

Date: Thu, 5 Nov 92 13:10:46 +0300
From: alona@math.huji.ac.il (Alon Amit)
Message-Id: <9211051010.AA01147@sunbeam.huji.ac.il>
Subject: Questions from a musically-inclined potential buyer...
To: Ultrasound Daily Digest <ultrasound@dsd.es.com>

Hello to y'all GUCsters!
I hope posting questions is OK. If not, please accept my apologies.

General background: I'm interested in the GUS for purposes of making music, NOT for
playing games etc. (Although this could be nice, too...). I already have a considerable
amount of MIDI gear, including a Proteus/1 synthesizer, a Music-Quest MPU-401 
compatible card for my PC, a keyboard, etc... SO:

A. Is the 16-bit sampling daughterboard available already? What are its specs?
   What software is available for it, if any?

B. What exactly is the story with the Windows drivers? I would like to trigger .WAV files
   from Cakewalk for Windows. Will it work? If the file is BIG, can it be loaded to my
   main memory (I mean, the memory on the PC, of course...) - I have 8 Meg of that?
   Or do I have to enlarge the memory on the GUS?

C. How good is the on-board synthesis, and I DON'T mean in comparison with the AdLib
   or SoundBlaster? I don't believe it's comparable to a Proteus, but...

D. If I somehow manage to get a good .WAV editing software, like Wave from Turtle-Beach
   which comes with theis MultiSound card, would it be possible to use it with the
   GUS?

E. In cotrast with the MultiSound card and even the Ensoniq which wasn't even released
   yet, the GUS never got mentioned in any of the magazines I read, namely Electronic
   Musician and Keyboard, and I must say this makes me (and a lot of other people I know)
   very suspicious. Does someone have an idea - why?

I guess that's enough for now. I'll be infinitely grateful to anyone who sends me some
answers. I think the best way is to e-mail me directly, and I promise to collect the 
info and sent it back to the Mailing List. Thanks a lot!

									- A. A.

Alon Amit
alona@sunrise.huji.ac.il

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

Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1992 16:59:36 -0500
From: Markus Ngus <mcng@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca>
Message-Id: <92Nov5.165944est.253234-1@descartes.uwaterloo.ca>
To: Ultrasound Daily Digest <ultrasound@dsd.es.com>

I've just download the DEMO.LZH file from the file-request server and
uudecode the thing.  I un-lha the demo0012.mid file and attempted
to play the file using the "playmidi.exe demo0012"

First of all I've recently upgraded my card to 1 meg of D-RAM 70 ns
and I've noticed a huge improvement when I played some of my Midi files.

but with DEMO0012 and a few other MIdI's (around 50-65% of the them) will
play but I get the error some thing like :" Can't load program ## to channel 6"
I get 1 to 3 lines of this per file load.  Some play well enough, mind you 
that some instruments are missing and hence there are pauses in the play.

But with DEMO0012.MID I get the message "Can't load program ## to channel ##"
and  after a few bars,  playmidi stop and kicks me to c: prompt and
the system Halts...  Playmidi returned the message of something like 
" Divide Error " or " Divid by Zero Erro ".. something to that effect.

I'd like to know why... is it my some DRAM's are bad?   hmm well also
how would I do a diagostic of my DRAM's.

Another problem is that I've noticed that a couple of my Midi's during play 
have either really really bad patch sample ( I get what sounds like a 
messed/mixed up sounds )  

Any suggestions, flames , responses appreciated, thank you..

Mark Ng

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

Date: Thu, 5 Nov 92 09:59:29 -0500
From: ylee@norton.uwaterloo.ca
Message-Id: <9211051459.AA03498@norton.uwaterloo.ca>
To: Ultrasound Daily Digest <ultrasound@dsd.es.com>

Hi, everyone.

I'd like to comment on several things. Someone mentioned that MIDI synthesizer
driver doesn't work at all with any windows softwares othere than Mediaplyer
but that's not necessarily true. I just got MIDPLAY ( MIDIPLAY ) that was 
discussed on PC Magazine and it worked! It's only 10k in size but it plays MIDI
files just like Media Player. Gravis claimed at one point it ( MIDI file not
playing in such programs like Cakewalk for windows demo, Win jammer, any 
Jukebox program , etc.. ) isn't necessarilly a bug in the driver but something
else ( I don't quite remember what it was ). BTW, MIDPLA comes with complete
source code so someone could fix MIDI keyboard from PC Magazine with this then 
we can experiment with various instruments in Windows. :)

Secondly, I really miss some kind of music composition software. DAK's media
master comes with many useful softwares and it seems almost like the hardware
comes free with those bundled softwares. ( one of them is MusicMentor from
MidiSoft - for windows ) On the other hand, gravis Ultrasound really miss that.
Several months ago, someone mentioned that Ultrasound will be bundled with 
some sort of software that will let us compose music and manipulate digital
sound. I guess it was supposed to be USS8. USS8 doesn't do much. It doesn't 
even do echo. It's more or like bundled shareware demo program. This is a big
minus for Ultrasound since all other Soundcard comes with some usefull softwaresnow.

And the last, I'd like to apologize to those people with only 256k ram who
tried playing the MIDI file I uploaded here. I didn't realize the problem
until someone mentioned it here. Sorry...  

I'm happy with my Ultrasound but it seems like the waiting is not over yet.
( New windows driver and General MIDI patch set ) 

Later,

Yuri

ylee@sunee.uwaterloo.ca

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

End of Ultrasound Daily Digest V1 #11
******************************

