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Creating Music Using Your PC?
onenil asks: "I'm a guy who has sort of fallen into IT from a young age, but was also quite heavily into music when I was younger. I now want to spark up my interest in music again as I want to broaden my horizons, and I figure the best way to do it is with my PC. I've started looking around for hardware and software, and have come to the conclusion that the best option is to buy a simple MIDI keyboard for music input (which just takes the keys you play and sends em off to the computer, with no in-built synthesizer) and a really kick-ass software package to do all the sound processing. Are there any musicians out there who can shed some light on this area?"
"I've been told by a shop clerk that with a simple Sound Blaster Live s/c, I'll need to buy a package like Reason as it processes all sounds with the CPU, and sends one track to the sound card. Reason retails for around AU$995 (roughly $500 US?). Is this the best way to go? Or should I perhaps look at a more hardware-based solution (some type of synthesizer built-in to a sound card, or perhaps a keyboard that does synth and output). As I'm just starting, out I want something that gives good sound (I don't like the MIDI that comes out of my SBLive), but also doesn't cost too much. It would be great to also build on it when my wants and desires aren't fulfilled by what I have."
OK, for all to know. You need buzz-tracker. Its freeware, has a million simulated machines (drum machines, effects, reverb, flange, distortion, physically modelled instruments). Its completely pluggable. It can be found at djLasers site or at BuzzMachines.com. Try to download the biggest pack possible. It runs on Windows, just FYI. If you want to hear some stuff made on it, you can check out dTx Productions. Some of the songs towards the top there were made entirely in Buzz with no mastering. I wish somebody would take Buzz into sourceforge, and attach a different IDE to it. The current is very usable, but it could be better. Anyways, hope that helps.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
Reaktor by Native Instruments. It's got incredible analog synth support and a very extensible architecture. Since it does full sound modeling, you can create your own custom instruments from scratch. Not the cheapest around, but if you search Usenet, you'll find lots of user praise for it.
If you're going to be using a software synth, make sure you have an external box for both note-playing (e.g. a keyboard controller), as well as something that you can use to twiddle knobs in real-time (e.g. a knob controller). Working with a mouse is pure headache. its much more fun when you can edit more than one parameter at a time while your sequence is blaring away.
This is assuming you're using software that can accept messages from the midi bus.
but your primary goal? buy something that you'd want to play. go to your local music hardware store, spend a few hours, and the synth that you keep going back to because its fun should be the one you should get.
you don't keep doing anything if its not fun.
It is beyond my imagination why on Earth anyone would want to use GIF, now when we have PNG. GIF used to be the best format for some kinds of graphics in the past, but then came JPEG for natural photographic lossy compression (yes, photographic pictures used to be stored as GIF before JPEG) and later came PNG for lossless compression (giving us everything the GIF format has, plus 32-bit RGBA with real alpha channel, better compression, gamma correction, file integrity checks, seven-pass two-dimensional interlacing, et cetera). Now GIF is not even remotely optimal in any niche. Besides, its 8 bits per pixel limit is laughable in the year 2002.
Don't tell me that we need GIF for animated banners, they are useless and still we have MNG for that. (I'm talking about animated raster images, not vector graphics, for which there is SVG, or the proprietary Flash format.)
Or maybe you need the LZW itself? Then why won't you use zlib or libbz2?
If you think that we should use GIF to make a point against software patents then it is already too late. When freely using GIF becomes legal, then it is not civil disobedience any more. If now we all start to use GIF, they win. Why? Because that would mean that it was a good idea to patent LZW, as now when the patent expires, everyone finally benefits having and being able to use the wonderful file format which the GIF is.
The problem with that situation is that GIF was useless long before the patent would expire, therefore giving no contribution whatsoever to the community at large. And remember that this is the whole point of patent law. Patent law is not for inventor's benefit, it is for humanity benefit, while the inventor's temporary monopoly for her invention is merely a trade-off, a compromise needed to achieve the real goal.
When the patent expiration time is to long, humanity don't benefit at all, and this is the real problem with software patents, because with software often a 5-year period is unacceptable. A GIF-related patents expiring in 2002 is like zeppelin patent expiring in 2250. Great, we all can now fly zeppelins! But who cares?
~Christopher Doopov