[linux-audio-user] Interesting product...

davidrclark at earthlink.net davidrclark at earthlink.net
Thu Jan 6 01:47:33 EST 2005


Greetings all and Happy New Year!

Regarding Synful Orchestra, Florin posted:

> Pretty good but the solo sequences are a bit wooden.
> It might be better at large-scale orchestral parts.

With headphones, these examples are almost obnoxious.  It's too bad because
they do indeed sound "pretty good" with speakers, much better than my hardware
synths for orchestral music.  

I took the liberty of creating a brand new recording *for headphones* which
sound much better *to me* (and which falls under the Fair Use provisions of 
Title 17 USC):

http://home.earthlink.net/~davidrclark/linux_audio_users/beet_4416_phasor.mp3

I call this rendition "Beethoven Quartet in Motion."  The purpose is to
demonstrate "3-D Audio" with headphones to those who might find this type 
of music more interesting than static recordings and typical commercial
CD production techniques AND listen to Synful's synthesizer with headphones.
I apologize to those pure classicists who find this interpretation heretical.

To those with less sensitive ears, this was not produced by mere panning,
and it's not merely the case that the stereo field was widened.  And, of
course, you have my sympathy.  The software to do this processing was 
developed using GNU tools under Linux, and I thank that development 
community.

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

The patent cover sheets look interesting, too. (See the Synful web site for 
PDF docs under "About Us," scroll to bottom if you're interested in synthesis
technology.)  I disagree with an earlier posting which claimed that this
actually is a sampler technology, but I see how one could claim that it was.
It's one of those things that defies classification into "is" and "is not"
and requires description.

I am somewhat skeptical of Synful's implication that producing high-quality
works would not require a lot of (MIDI) work.  There are a lot of contoller
message in the Beethoven piece.  Yes, there are tools to help, but to get
things to sound right --- I just find it hard to believe.  *Less* MIDI work
than with other synthesizers, probably.


Regards to all,
Dave.





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