Roland Sound Canvas

NB.

The RSV is also for Win 9x - just that the Yamaha isn't available for
Win 2K which is why the Roland is of particular interest for that
platform.

I had a good look and there are very few GM soft synths around
and those seem to be the two main ones. Would be interested
if anyone knows about others. I have also tried Wingroove
and about Timidity - maybe I will mention those too
- just happen to prefer Yamaha and Roland sounds. I know that
some composers like Timidity too.

Also know of the Beatnik but not tried it out.

- and have Quicktime, but don't like that as much as the
Yamaha + Roland either, not sure how you can
relay midi notes to it either - here it just seems
to work as a plug in for the web browser, but maybe
there is some setting or check box I don't know about
that will make it avaible to applications too.

Don't know of any others - plenty of soft synths
but the GM ones are rather few and far between.

Robert

Hi Robert

Thanks for testing and recommending a good softsynth for the windows
2000 platform. FTS is an amazing product and I've been looking for a
good synth to work with your program for quite some time.

I will download the Roland SoftSynth and install the trial version
for win2k.

How is the delay factor? Is there much of a lag time between when I
actually hit a note and actually hear it?

Thanks for your support.

Regards
Wally

Hi Wally,

> How is the delay factor? Is there much of a lag time between when I
> actually hit a note and actually hear it?

Yes, there is on my computer - but it is a 400 Mhz Celeron so getting
a bit old now.

When playing the fractal tunes you can set the delay as high as you like
but when playing from keyboard one needs to set it low and eventually
you get artefacts when it is too low - I think gaps in the sound
if I remember right.

Managed to set it low enough to be quite playable with a bit
of delay in the action which one can get used to. I think it's a
bit slower than the Yamaha in that respect (prob. should have
said something about that in the review).

However, I think with a not much more recent computer it will
probably have very little delay. I remember there was a
dramatic difference for the FM7 when I tried it out
on a more recent XP machine earlier this year
- could set the delay right down to the minimum.
So perhaps one could do the same with the Roland Sound Canvas
- would be interested to hear what your findings
are on that.

Thanks

Robert

Hi there,

Just to correct what I said before about those many small peaks.

I've found out that what caused it is that I'd been doing the
fft for repeated notes repeating every second for the percussive
instruments to get enough data - of course the repetition period
of once a second shows up in the FFT results along with all its
overtones. This was easily demonstrated because when I changed
the repetition rate, the positions of the peaks shifted t
be closer or further apart.

Then for the non percussive instruments such as violin
or oboe etc (which I did as single long contiuous
notes for the entire sample) - then what it shows I'm pretty sure
are overtones of the vibrato frequency -
because all those voices get recorded in the
wave tables with a very slight but audible
vibrato - that surely must show up in the
results along with its overtones. It's not an
artefact of the FFT as the positions of the peaks
remain the same when you use larger time intervals.

Possibly none of them are actually to do with the
actual timbre of the instrument.

Robert