Scoring Software
Looking for software that is primarily designed for composition? The trick, says Kelly Demoline of Kelly's Music & Computers, is find one that will do everything you need it too without paying for more! The first step, says Kelly, is to determine what types of scoring capabilities you need. Do you want to print parts/score, guitar tab, percussion symbols, insert graphics anywhere on the score, etc. Those for whom the technical ease of composition and printing of scores is more important than advanced midi capability may be interested in the following notation titles:
For the high end, Kelly recommends Finale (www.finalemusic.com), Encore (www.gvox.com) or Cubase Score (www.steinberg.net). Graeme Bennett says his favorite title for scoring is Sibelius, available for Windows and Mac (including Mac OS X.) Bennett also recommends Cubase Score, especially for those tackling more complex sequencing and audio recording tasks. Read more about these titles in part 2 of this feature.
(Mac users should also check out Emagic's Logic Audio Platinum, another serious player in the audio/MIDI sequencing-and-scoring category.)
Although Passport Designs, the makers of Encore and Rhapsody, went bankrupt in 1998, the company has since been acquired by G-VOX, which outbid rival Coda Music Technology for the rights to the Passport name and product line. See www.gvox.com for details on its latest Encore, MusicTime and Master Tracks Pro offerings and pricing.
For less expensive programs, says Kelly, try Allegro (a scaled down Finale) or Rhapsody (a scaled own Encore.) You can also look at programs from Voyetra (http://www.voyetra.com) MidiSoft (now reincarnated as RecordLab.com, as detailed in part 2 of this feature) or Jump!. For a combined sequencer/notation/digital audio, Kelly recommends Musicator (http://www.musicator.com), noting that it is "really cheap."
Another low cost alternative is Music Studio Deluxe from Magix Entertainment (http://www.magix.net). It is a fairly well designed, integrated program that includes sequencing, notation (to a lesser degree) and digital audio.
Stop by Kelly's Music & Computers web site at http://kellysmusic.ca/Default.asp for more info. It has a large section on using Music Technology in Education - some of which will also interest non-music educators.
Linux
There are a few scoring programs available for Linux, too. One of the better efforts is dubbed KooBase (in an obvious nod to the program from Steinberg that inspired it). It runs under the KDE graphical environment for Linux. Read more....
See also:
Audio Recording Software
We should start by saying that recording multiple tracks of high-quality audio (or video) on a computer is a state-of-the-art application that presents a considerable challenge to your hardware and software. Many things can -- and do -- go wrong. For example, Usenet reports complaining about sloppy timing and latency problems in apps like Cakewalk, Cubase VST and other apps are common.
Consider, for example, this excerpt from a post lamenting the recording capabilities of Cakewalk Pro Audio: "...I have a pretty impressive system (Pentium II 233 MHz, 64MB SDRAM, SCSI drives, high-end sound card), and the damn thing just really bogs down the system when I use more than a few audio tracks or effects. It pauses and jitters, and sometimes just stops," writes Don Ambory. While it's easy to point to the speed limitations of this formerly "pretty impressive" system as the obvious problem, the fact is: even faster computers can suffer slowdowns and other recording glitches, if things are set up incorrectly or not maintained properly.
On Windows PCs, IRQ contention can lead to oddball glitches. Fragmented drives can slow disk writing and playback. On Macs, operating system overhead of the notoriously sluggish Mac OS X can cause applications to behave more sluggishly than they do under the older Mac OS 9. The list goes on and on....
It's worth mentioning that plugin effects are the biggest culprits when it comes to bogging down even the studliest CPUs. FX. Using fewer FX and fewer tracks (and a fast CPU and properly configured SCSI hard drive) will minimize problems.
As well, consider the following tip from Sonorus, which we have found applies to most of the sound cards and sequencers we've seen. Says Sonorus, "If you are getting 'loss of realtime' errors, or dropouts, or your audio editor is mysteriously dropping out of play/record, suspect your video card. In your System control panel, under Advanced, click the Graphics... button and turn graphics acceleration all the way down. Many video cards out there hog the PCI bus in order to excel in magazine review benchmarks." See the Sonorus web site at www.sonorus.com for more pointers and links on how to tame your video.
We haven't tested it yet, but users familiar with Sek'd Samplitude 4.5 report that it is a big improvement in terms of usability over the messy and confusing interfaces of previous versions. The company offers a demo for download at www.sekd.com. Also getting better with age is Syntrillium's CoolEdit Pro demo (a limited version of which comes with Event Electronics' Layla). CEP only seems to use MIDI for triggering, though. A demo is at www.syntrillium.com.
A growing number of programs promise to kill two birds with one stone, as tools like Cubase VST, Logic Audio, CakeWalk Audio, Digital Performer, etc., are updated to handle both MIDI and audio files. Generally speaking, we find that a dedicated sample editor (Sound Forge and Cool Edit Pro remain our favorites, although Steinberg's WaveLab is a hot contender) is still a useful convenience, if no longer always a necessity. See our earlier Music and Audio Software report for more info on these and other titles.
Also, see our report on Audio Recording for info on free MP3 tools and other audio recording tips.
Latency
It is important to be aware of the problems that some sound cards (and, indeed, some software programs) have with latency -- an annoying delay between the time you press a key or input an audio signal, and the time you hear it.
Microsoft has addressed this issue somewhat with its DirectSound technology. According to Ted Henderson, Reality Product Manger at Seer Systems, a partial list of soundcards supporting or soon to be supporting DirectSound includes the Terratec EWS64L, the Guillemot MAXIsound, the Digital Audio Lab's Card-D series, Turtle Beach cards, The Hoontech Soundtech 97 PCI, AVM Apex and all Creative Labs cards. Almost all laptop computers, he adds, support DirectSound. Notably absent from this list are Event's Layla, Gina and Darla soundcards -- their DirectSound drivers were, at this writing, not yet completed.
Seer Systems says cards that do not support DirectSound should still work with its Reality v1.5 software synthesizer but there may be a noticeable delay between the time that you hit a key on your keyboard and the time that you hear the sound.
ASIO is a proprietary driver format used by Steinberg Cubase VST. A sound card that has optimized ASIO drivers reduces the delay between the input and output in Cubase. The term for this is "latency." For example, a card such as a SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold, without ASIO drivers has a severe latency problem -- inputs suffer a full 3/4 second (750ms) delay before they are passed to the outputs. (Because both Cubase VST and the AWE64 support DirectSound, it is possible to reduce playback latency by switching to this driver. This problem was finally addressed with the release of Cubase 5.0. It includes a DirectX "full duplex" driver that supports recording and latencies as low as 11 ms. (Compare this with a "pro level" card such as the Sonorus STUDI/O -- considered hot stuff back in Q3/98 -- which once was able to boast latency as low as 32ms, depending on the settings, the number of tracks, effects, and the power of the CPU. As Sonorus points out, deactivating inputs and/or output busses frees up more CPU time for processing, so when you're mixing, deactivate your inputs for maximum plugin/FX processing bandwidth.) Best of all, the DX driver from the demo version of Cubase VST 5 can be copied from the ASIO folder and used with 3.x versions of the program and virtually any sound card!
Unfortunately, some sound cards still produce less than idea results. The once-popular SoundBlaster AWE64, for example, played back the previously recorded track(s) in low fidelity when recording in "full duplex." Worse, Cubase's DirectSound driver doesn't seem to support this card under Windows 2000. In our tests, the DirectX driver supported playback only when used with the AWE64 -- and there is no ASIO MME option at all. Thus, VST and an AWE64 make a poor pair. The newer Audigy sound card is one of the least expensive Windows sound cards with high-performance ASIO driver support. As always, exact latency values vary, depending on your system's overall performance, but values of 4 to 7 ms are achievable.
Beyond that, a card such as that bundled with Cubase and WaveLab in the Steinberg Studio Pack (about C$1050) makes the best choice for a serious musician. The Steinberg card (actually, a repackaged RME 96/8 PST) works well under Windows 2000 and XP, too. Latencies as low as 5ms are possible, and there's a direct monitoring option that you won't find on cheaper cards such as the Creative Labs Audigy.
Reducing Latency in Cubase VST: As noted above, by reducing the buffer size, you can reduce latency in Cubase VST's audio section. We managed to reduce the latency in an SB Live! card from 775 ms to 17 ms by using the latest DX driver, reducing buffer size, being careful to test our settings as we went. At least on our 450 MHz test system, the optimal size, as set in ASIO Control Panel>Advanced Settings, was 5 buffers, 1400 samples each, with Sync set to "Sample Position - Input." Be sure to click the button labeled "Run simulation" before saving to ensure that the settings will work for your configuration. We also found that selecting 48KHz reduced latency slightly on this card.
For further reading:
See also
Thanks to the staff of Long & McQuade, Annex Pro, Kelly's Music, Ward Music and Tom Lee Music in Vancouver for their valuable assistance in the preparation of this article.
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