88CET Ear-Training CDs, Part 4

As kind of an addendum to Garys statements re using CDRs vs.
cassettes, I'll throw in a pitch for the MiniDisc as well.

What little they suffer in terms of quality vis-a-vis a
noncompressed digital format like CD or DAT, they make
up for in portability. You get nearly the same random
access ability as with CD, you can even set loops up,
and they're hard to beat for rugged, tiny good sounding
audio-on-the-go.

IMHO, they best all but the most fastidiously aligned
cassette machines, and the latest Sony home decks (JE-510)
are sub $300 now, and sound great. I have the slightly
earlier JE-500, and find that the live recordings I've
done with it are better than those I've made with
dbx and metal cassettes on my Marantz PMD-430.

YMMV, of course.

(Then again, neither sound as good to me as 10.5 inch reels of tape
@15ips but you won't see me with one of those on the subway,
either. ;-)

Steve

QuickTime 2.5 (built-in Macintosh software synthesizer) uses 9 bits of
pitch bend information over a +-2 semitone range, for a resolution of
1536 steps/octave. I wouldn't be too sad...that's the same resolution
as the Ensoniq MR Rack tuning tables, giving a maximum error of about
0.4 cent and on average half that.

I'm not a MAX user, but assuming that xbendouts are the same as MIDI
pitch bend messages (+-8192 = 14 bits), you can round off to the
nearest multiple of 32 for best results since I imagine QT just
truncates the higher bits.

QuickTime 3.0 is just out in beta release, with a better sounding and
more complete set of instruments (Roland GM and GS) than 2.5. The
Just Intonation Calculator (JICalc) continues to work with QT3.0, but
seems to require a machine with more than 8MB of memory to stay
afloat.

P.S. On a related subject, I was surprised to discover that my Yamaha
SY99's pitch bend resolution is a measly 384/octave at the +-2
semitone range, increasing to 768/octave at +-1 semitone. I had
assumed it would be the same as the tuning tables, which are the
standard Yamaha 1024/octave. Just goes to show that experimentation
is a Good Thing.

Ken Wauchope

> Dear MAX-MICROTUNISTS on this list,

> Did I ask this before?
> I'm still using QT2.5 as the sound module for my MAX3.0.
> I love microtuning things so use a bunch of xbendout oriented things in
> my patch....but now wondering...if my QT is handling 14bit-bend-date
> correctly...my ear is not good enough to test this...ah..
> So sad if it's only handling it as the 7bit thing and ignoring the rest.