[LAU] Introduction and questions

[Jay Vaughan]

I'm the author of a3kdisky .. I'm currently porting it to FUSE .. Just FYI ..

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seclorum 

On Nov 16, 2010, at 5:26, Batz <batzman-lau at all-electric.com> wrote:

> Y-ellow All and thanks for the kind responses.
>        Out of interest. Yes the name does attract the ladies. Right up until they find out I'm actually a geek. It's all down hill from there.
> 
> I was deliberately brief. Or as brief as possible with my first message. So I'll try to elaborate a little without getting too wordy. Which I am inclined to do.
> 
> Apart from the many crazy things I do, I'm something of an electronics engineer. I know very little about coding except for machine code on small micros. In fact, truth be known, I can barely compile a kernel to save myself. Sad but true. And whilst my lab is currently in a state of disarray, I am mainly a hardware person. Apart from a little bit of machine code on small micros, I couldn't cobble together "hello world" in a pink fit.
> 
> The problem is that slackware has no native package loader. It sometimes works with RPMs and DEBs but I will probably require a lot of hand-holding to get this to work. But I'm more familiar with slackware than anything else. I'm the kind of animal that dives in as root and damn the consequences. I never did get along with ubuntu for that reason. :(
> 
> I have a Yamaha A4000 sampler but nothing will talk to it's proprietary file system. There use to be some software for BOSH (AKA Bastard Operating System from Hell. AKA windows. ) called A3Kdisky. This is apparently the only thing out there which will understand the FS. However it's totally made of unobtainium these days. I've been searching for it for months. The A4K would otherwise be perfect. Nice filters. 3 FX chains. Solid hardware. Perhaps a little too solid as it's big and weighs a ton. Best of all, I've got one right here right now. And it's fully tricked out. But if I can't talk to it, it's really just a boat anchor.
> 
> Some ten years ago, before my musical career took a detour into 3D graphics, I use to use a lowly Creati-Flabs AWE32 sound card as a sampler. This was surprisingly serviceable. It was limited but I still managed to record albums, master and play live with it. Scary as that thought might seem. I liked the work-flow in fact. There were lots of trade-offs but apart from anything else, it's ISA and can't be pressed into service these days.
> 
> It seems none of the good ol' wave-table sound cards are of any use these days. Even the old SAM7 based Terratech cards. That was then and this is now.
> 
> So this would be the basic spec I'd be looking for...
> 
> *32 voices or more polyphonic.
> *16 part polytimbral or greater
> *Multi-mode filters per voice.
> *Stereo sampling (If possible) Although 2 mono layers would be fine.
> *Decent envelopes. (IE: something better than an ADSR) Filter and amplitude
> *Syncable, multi-wave-form LFOs
> *3 effects chains. (Rev/Chor/flange/del etc)
> *Should have low latency so it can be played live. And an S/PDIF out.
> 
> Being a computing platform it may as well have some wave editing software on-board as well. But otherwise be a turn-key system. With as much non-essential stuff stripped out of the OS as possible. I'll still need networking and SAMBA though. And if it could do MIDI over Ether, it would be the ant's pants. Otherwise it would have to talk to a generic, (Read cheap Chinese made) USB MIDI interface.
> 
> Hardware wise I'd like to keep it as small as possible. In fact if I could squeeze the whole thing into a 1U 19" rack boxen I'd be over the moon. Regardless of which it has to live in a 19" rack for gigging. I was thinking that perhaps I could find an old lap top with a broken screen for nix. Tear it apart and, as a friend of mine once put it. "Modify it beyond manufacturer's specification." This of course means it would be using a 5400RPM disk drive. Although perhaps with a little cable jockying, I could run a 3.5" drive in the box. It would be nice if I could get it to boot from FLASH but just as long as it's relatively physically quiet.
> 
> On the other hand, I'm not sure it be possible to get the latency down to an acceptable (Read real-time) rate with on-board sound. Unless there's a trick I can do under linux? Most Mo-bo sound systems have a buffer which can't easily be tweaked. Therefore it may be necessary to use a PCI card of some kind. And I need to figure this out before I even start thinking about nailing a test-bed to a piece of wood.
> 
> Which brings me to another, perhaps stupid question. What about the notion of getting something like a Soundblaster Live or Audigy card and using that? When I say hardware based, I mean that the wave-table engine is based in hardware rather than software. So that the software need only control the hardware. This is a far more robust solution. But it would still have to meet the above specs (Or something close) and I would still need to be able to edit/tweak and play it as a synth. It also means that the CPU wouldn't have to be as fast. Probably even a PIII would suffice. (Were it not for the GUI.) Has anyone done this kind of thing to any great effect?
> 
> I've got a few VIA based Mo-bos. I don't know how fast the smaller ones are but they're tiny. I have been thinking for a long time how nice it would be to build a linux based synth with an actual front panel. This is a long term goal but it would be rather cool. Design the front panel fairly generically and shove the board out on the net. Then people could chose the synth system they want to build, whack the front panel onto a Mo-bo and build a proper rack synth. Only a synth that can be upgraded and tweaked.
> 
> For now though, I'm rather desperate for a sampler I can get together and gig with. So I'm open to suggestions.
> 
> Thanks in advance. Very much appreciated.
> 
> Be absolutely icebox.
> 
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