JICalc alternat. for PC,Synth tuning,...

Hey Patrick ,All,

>> (BTW, if you have access to a Mac and haven't yet gotten the JICalc, do it
>> now!)
>
>No Mac, I'm afraid. Is there a PC equivalent?
I believe Scala might do the trick ! On 23rd Mar Manuel Op de Coul
announced a bug fixed
release version 1.4 . It's at

J.Starrett's page should have a link to more info about it


>>> Hate to be a wet blanket, etc.
>
>Totally agreed with John Loffink's reply to this - there has been
>progress, and there will be more.

Agreed.I hope everyone's optimism about what synth makers will do bears
fruit. I snuck in the
wet blanket thing because the thread was getting a little too happy ;-)
One of the reasons
I prefer a sceptical view is I'm never dissapointed and I've seen so much
craziness in general,
almost nothing surprises me anymore.

>> It would take mucho
>>RAM, @ 100Kb for ea. mono sample @ one second long. I don't think
>>looping all those samples to conserve memory is a good way to keep
>>sane. Besides, I think David First said something important about the
>>nitty gritty of the looping process. If you need to set up all 128
>>MIDI notes, that's 100Kb * 128= @12.5MB per "instrument",per layer
>>(if you need velocity switching samples,etc). It would take one of
>>those 128MB samplers to pull it off.
>
>I'm not sure I undertood this correctly, or whether it's
>(remotely?) true for all samplers.
Well, to be more accurate, one sec. of mono 16-bit,44.1KHZ sound should
take @86 to 95KB.
What's up with the "(remotely?)" bit ? Someone please correct me if I've
got something
wrong.

Plus,most samplers cannot hold 128 samples per "instrument"/channel.
You'd have to
use more than one channel to set up a 128-note multi-sample instrument.

I checked & in Digest 1393 Gary (not David) said :
>Also, having worked a lot with sampled tones looped on a single
>vibration, which obviously renders them exactly harmonic, I can certainly
>attest to the fact that the timbre changes slightly when it drops into
>looping. And that timbre changes in a manner consistent with overtone
>detuning.
etc.

And in Digest 1400 David First wrote :
>In addition, it has been my experience that when creating JI related sample
>loops, that it is not enough that the frequency relationships be exact - the
>period of the wave cycles involved all must have a simple divisible integer
>relation with one common compound period/sample length. Further, I believe
>that it is best to have a simple divisible relationship with the sampling
>rate
>one is employing. As an example, for a recent set of 21 JI pitch
>relationships
>I developed, I used a common 1/1 period number/sample base length of 21870. I
>then doubled this number to achieve the sampling rate of 43740.
etc.

Which is what I meant by the looping not being a recipe for long term
sanity.
Besides which, when things get too convoluted the room tends to spin.
I'm not much for delayed gratification.

Speaking of D.First, a wee article about him in Guitar Player somewhere
between
1991 and 1993 (I think) was possibly the first time I read about
microtones. They did an
article on Glen Branca too @ the same time (maybe).
David, I remember reading it with fascination and it's a little weird
being on the
same list and quoting snippets of wisdom.

Later ,eh ?
-Drew