Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rutgers!clyde!cbatt!neoucom!wtm
From: wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: DMCS
Message-ID: <577@neoucom.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 9-May-87 11:48:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: neoucom.577
Posted: Sat May  9 11:48:01 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 10-May-87 08:52:17 EDT
References: <1606@munnari.oz>
Organization: Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine
Lines: 41
Summary: Yucky sounding instuments


Hi,

While were on the subject of shortcomings of DMCS, I'm surprised
that more poeple haven't complained out some of the pretty awful
sounds that come from some of the instruments.  Perhaps, it's just
my computer-- about a year ago my computer's Agnus suffered a mild
stroke and cuased random crashes, disk errors and one sound channel
to go south.  It took me three trips to the dealer for replacement
Agni.  Finally, I got one that seemed to cure all the problems.

I'm presuming that the aliasing sounds in lower registers of the
instruments are caused by sampling a high note on an instrument,
and then progressively decimating samples for each lower note.  In
the case of the DMCS instruments, it seems like very little has
been done to smooth the decimated samples.  It seems like it would
be reasonable to write a program to clean up the samples.  If my
reading of the 8SVX IFF format is correct (mine is rather old and
marked `preliminary') there is no particular need for every note in
an instrument to have the same number of samples, or even a related
number.  Low frequecy notes should be decminated, the original
sampling rate restored by duplicating samples, and then some
interpolation done to remove the jaggieness.  Of course, the result
won't sound exactly like the original instrument, but then what we
get now doesn't sound very natural either!  Of course, even better
would be to sample every note, but then that's *work* (grin).
Doing that would help maintain some of the tonal character
difference between the low and high registers of the sampled
instrument.

Obviously, somebody out there has done some cut and paste work as is
evidenced by Drumkit on Instant Music and DMCS's Percussion.

It's also rather annoying that EA's manuals never mention technical
information.  It would be nice to know something about file
formats, etc.  They shouldn't assume that all interested user's have
sent their checks in to get the IFF dox from Westchester.  Probably
the majority of real world user's aren't aware of that support
function  (luckily for the support people's sanity).

--Bill (wtm@neoucom.UUCP)