Preliminary Synful review

I downloaded the Synful Orchestra 2.2.0 demo for Windows (www.synful.com, thanks to Carl Lumma for mentioning it!) and tried it out on some of my MIDI files. The good news is that it *does* handle tuning by pitch bends. The bad news is that it often tries to do ... "creative" things with the pitch bends. Sometimes this is good, sometimes it isn't. Take this example:

http://home.comcast.net/~teamouse/16et.mp3

Play the original MIDI file for comparison:

http://www.io.com/~hmiller/midi/16tet.mid

Now there are some things about the Synful rendition that are VERY nice, and admittedly 16-ET is a pretty extreme tuning (one of the reasons I picked this one as a test case). I've found that I can fix some of the pitch problems by putting more space between notes. There's a tradeoff to that, of course: changing the articulation can also make a difference in the phrasing. But one of the things that's neat about this example is that Synful is playing the MIDI file as originally written. If you can ignore the pitch warping, just listen to the original MIDI file, with its minimal expressiveness, and compare it with what Synful manages to make out of it. This is without any special tweaking of MIDI controllers or anything. It remains to be seen whether the pitch problems can all be worked around, but even some sound cards have problems with sequences like this that have slightly overlapping notes (one reason why I used alternating channels in some of my later MIDI files).

Another nice thing is that the Synful Orchestra DXi plugin does manage to coexist with Cakewalk Music Creator Pro24 2004 and Cool Edit 2000 running at the same time with only 256 MB of physical memory on a Windows XP system. I was a little worried about that because of the system requirements. I don't know how many voices it's capable of playing with only 256 MB, but at least it runs. I didn't have to do anything special to get it to show up in Cakewalk: I just ran the Synful install program, launched Cakewalk, and there it was on the DXi Synth menu.

I have a total of 15 days to try out the demo version, so this is just a first impression, but so far it appears to be worth the time to look at it. There are certainly some issues with it, but it seems to run fine on a 4 year old system with the minimum memory requirement, and it can do some pretty amazing things. But if I can't figure out how to get the pitch bend to be reliable, it might not be worth the effort.

> I downloaded the Synful Orchestra 2.2.0 demo for Windows
> (www.synful.com, thanks to Carl Lumma for mentioning it!) and
> tried it out on some of my MIDI files. The good news is that
> it *does* handle tuning by pitch bends. The bad news is that
> it often tries to do ... "creative" things with the pitch bends.

Right -- it uses pitch wheel, volume pedal, MIDI velocity, and
a close inspection of note timing to match windows of the
MIDI stream to entries in the performance database. It's
incredible how much like a violin this approach can make a
keyboard performance sound, even in realtime (without look-ahead).
But it means microtuning by pitch bend is not a good idea.

> http://home.comcast.net/~teamouse/16et.mp3

Yeah, like I said.

Glad you're checking it out though! Why don't you write to
Eric and tell him you want MTS support? And he'll probably
love your music.

-Carl

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Herman Miller <hmiller@I...> wrote:

> I downloaded the Synful Orchestra 2.2.0 demo for Windows
> (www.synful.com, thanks to Carl Lumma for mentioning it!) and tried it
> out on some of my MIDI files.

Could you (and anyone else who's gotten it to work) detail exactly how
you did so?

Gene Ward Smith wrote:
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Herman Miller <hmiller@I...> wrote:
> > >>I downloaded the Synful Orchestra 2.2.0 demo for Windows >>(www.synful.com, thanks to Carl Lumma for mentioning it!) and tried it >>out on some of my MIDI files. > > > Could you (and anyone else who's gotten it to work) detail exactly how
> you did so?

Step one: go back in time a year and install Cakewalk Music Creator Pro24 2004. :-)

Actually, the hardest part for me was getting DXi plugins to work with Cakewalk on my system. This problem affects all DXi synths including the EDIROL VSC that came with Cakewalk, and I don't remember exactly what I did to fix it. The Cakewalk help has a section on "dropouts and other audio problems"; I just changed the settings around until I found a configuration that worked. I think I may have had the mixing latency set too low or something.

Once you have something installed that can run DXi plugins, it's just a matter of running the Synful install program. I used the default settings. It must have saved some settings in the Windows registry that Cakewalk knows about, since I didn't have to do anything special to get it to show up in the menu.

To play a MIDI file through it, I just load the MIDI file in Cakewalk, insert a DXi synth into the Cakewalk project (at which point the "activate now" or "activate later" option comes up), and redirect the MIDI output for a track to "Synful Orchestra 1". Repeat for each MIDI track in the project. Synful recognizes the MIDI program changes for the instruments it supports; everything else it leaves at the default "flute" setting unless you change it from the property page (each channel can have a different instrument).

If the MIDI file has pitch bends, then you need to manually go to each channel on the Synful control panel and change the pitch wheel range from 12 to 2. The other thing that affects pitch bend is the "Synful pitch wheel" option. At first I thought that turning this option off would be best, but it's just different. (It would be nice to have an option to use pitch bend purely for pitch and a separate MIDI control for the other non-pitch effects....)