sinclair@aero.ARPA (William S. Sinclair ) (08/07/85)
I recently attended an "emulator party" given in Burbank, put on by the E-mu people for their customers. It was mostly patch swapping, but there was an appearance by Digidesigns, wherer they showed their Soundesigner software for the Macintosh. Their stuff was mostly time-domain; it did not allow re-synthesis, although it did do an FFT of sampled sounds from the Emulator. The Emulators don't yet have MIDI, but Dave Rossum tells me that they're coming out with it in Sept. Since I am on the subject of samplers, I've noticing that people on the net are raving about the Ensoniq Mirage. I've heard them, and they sound TERRIBLE. I would not use one on a live gig; 8 bit sampling might be cheap, but the quality leaves something to be desired, unless you use some other tricks like Noise Feedback Coding, compression, etc.