phil@eos.arc.nasa.gov (Phil Stone) (01/16/91)
Bear with this somewhat lengthy preamble...or skip right to my point in the paragraph that starts "What I would really like...". I was experimenting with Synthia II last night. First, I'd like to say that this is an excellent program...someone put a great deal of careful design into it. In fact, if you want to design IFF or other "canned" voices for your amiga music programs, this has to be on your wish-list! However, I have written my own music performance system. I've worked on it and performed with it for the last few years. I like to be able to change sound parameters on the fly (i.e., during live performance), such as waveform (sample) indexes and lengths, amplitude envelopes, etc. (It has an amplitude-envelope driver that uses the CPU to update the sound chip amplitude registers, driven by timer device interrupts - I may make this public domain if interest is there and I can clean it up enough). As a result, many of the features that Synthia makes available are not useful to me, but are very close to being EXTREMELY useful. For instance, the beautiful envelope/waveform/table editor in Synthia (you really have to check this out if you haven't seen it yet) adjusts parameters which are used to compute a final, fixed instrument. Once that instrument is computed, its envelopes, for example, cannot be changed without recompting. This makes perfect sense for Synthia's intended purpose: computing fixed IFF-style voices for various Amiga music (sequence) playback programs. What I would really like to see, though, is a way to take deeper advantage of Synthia's diverse and well-designed modules. If waveforms, envelopes, and tables could be saved as raw data, they could be applied to *real-time* sound systems or whatever else might come to mind. Really, these are beautiful tools, and it could only enhance the usefulness of Synthia if this simple addition were made. Anyway, I'm going to send a copy of this to The Other Guys, who wrote and publish Synthia, and see if they are interested. Would anybody else care to echo this sentiment, or is this just a selfish wish? Phil Stone (phil@eos.arc.nasa.gov | ..ames!eos!phil)