Digi-Studio -- the new version¢------------------------------¢¢What it does, and how I did it!¢-------------------------------¢¢Article by Dean Garraghty.¢¢¢On Saturday 14th November 1992 at AMS6 in Stafford I launched the new complete version of Digi-Studio, my digitized sounds and music system. I have talked about the old package 1 on a previous News-Disk. The "missing part" of Digi-Studio was the tune editor. We need some way of creating our own tune files for playing with digitized sounds. That's what the new version is all about.¢¢If you don't know, Digi-Studio is a music creation system for digitized sounds. It is like all the other programs of this nature, BUT Digi-Studio uses "real" sounds that have been digitized. This includes things such as trumpets, synths, piano, pan pipes, guitars, pig grunts, bells, and loads of other things! You can play these live using the computer keyboard as a piano keyboard, or play tune files using the sounds. You can also edit the samples using the supplied editor, or create your own using a joystick. You can also add tunes to your own Basic or Turbo-Basic prgrams and play them using real sounds!¢¢Originally, the tune editor was going to be sold as "package 2". But, I have now scrapped the "package" idea and merged all parts of Digi-Studio into one big package. This contains new updated versions of the Keyboard and Tune Players from package 1, as well as the Sample Editor and Tune Compiler from package 1.5. But, it also has the new tune creation system. This allows you to create your own tunes from sheet music for use with Digi-Studio. For this purpose, I have created a new language called LIDS (Language for Instructing Digitized Sound).¢¢LIDS is a new computer language in which you describe sheet music to the computer. You write your programs and then use the LIDS Compiler to turn them into tune files for playing in the Digi-Studio system, or even in your own Basic or Turbo-Basic programs!¢¢LIDS is a very easy language to learn and use. Most of the commands are derived straight from sheet music. If you can already read music, the LIDS will take no time at all to learn! If you can't, don't worry. The manual supplied with Digi-Studio contains an extensive section on how to read music. This also includes examples of real music along with their LIDS programs. An example LIDS command could be: A3 C. This in fact describes the note A in octave 3, played for a crotchet. Sharps and flats are also handled. LIDS also has extra commands to allow you to do some clever things. E.g. it allows repeats like this:¢¢RS¢A3 C¢C3# M¢B2 Q¢A2 Q¢RF¢¢Also, it has facilities for handling tied notes like this:¢¢TS¢A3 C¢Q¢M¢TF¢¢It also takes care of the time signature. E.g. if the music to be programmed was in 6/8 time, you can issue the command SIG 8 to LIDS and it will take care of it. Also, you can take care of different tempos by use of a command called SPEED. This can speed up or slow down the music.¢¢The LIDS Compiler has a built-in text editor for editing LIDS programs. This means you can also compile straight from memory! The LIDS Compiler also has a feature called "wrap". This allows you to add sustain to long notes.¢¢As I mentioned earlier, the Keyboard and Tune Players have been updated. The Keyboard Player has had a few of its notes altered to play more in tune! Also, and offset option has been added. This is for the benefit on non-UK users who hear notes being played differently due to different clock rates. However, UK users can use it to make some samples sound more in tune. Try -10 to make some samples sound more in tune! The Tune Player also has the offset function in. The Tune Compiler (for allowing to merge Digi-Studio tunes in your own Basic programs) has also been updated with the offset option. It also allows you to quit the program more easily now.¢¢NOTE: the LIDS compiler is now in version 1.2. This has corrected a problem with pitch representation. All registered users will be sent a copy of v1.2 soon. But, the tunes on the disk should still be played with offset set to -10. Any you create with v1.2 should be set to 0. No copies of version 1.1 were sold in the US, so all US users will get v1.2. Only a hand full of v1.1 got out anyway!¢¢The new complete version of Digi-Studio comes on 2 DS/SD disks and includes a 44 page A4 sized manual. Disk one has the programs and some tunes and samples on. Disk two contains more tunes and samples. In all, 55 samples are provided, and 44 ready-to-play tunes.¢¢The manual is extensive! I know, I wrote it! It is fully typeset and laser printed. It is extremely detailed. Each program within the Digi-Studio system has its own section. The manual also has sections on reading music and programming in the LIDS language. It also has an appendix with examples of sheet music along with the corresponding LIDS programs. This manual should tell you everything you need to know about Digi-Studio!¢¢Digi-Studio costs 12pounds+1pound P&P in the UK. This includes the 2 disks and manual mentioned. However, it is also available in the US from my distributor. Over there it costs $29.95+$1.50 shipping. In the US it is available from: Lance Tatman, 844 Kern Street, Richmond, CA 94805.¢¢In the UK and non-US countries it is available direct from me:¢DEAN GARRAGHTY, 62 THOMSON AVE, BALBY, DONCASTER, DN4 0NU, ENGLAND. Price to EEC countries: 15pounds including shipping. Please contact me for prices to other countries. Please pay in UK funds by IMO or in cash in pounds. Use registered post if sending cash.¢¢¢That was the what it does part of the article, now what went on behind the scenes!¢¢The Digi-Studio project started way back in the summer of 1990. It was an attempt to create a utility for creating music using digitized sounds. The first bit of the system was launched at AMS5 in November 1991. My previous article explains all about that!¢¢After package 1, I thought it would be a good idea to have a utility to fiddle with the sounds! I remember seeing a similar thing on the Voice Master demo disk, so I thought I'd have a go at writing one for Digi-Studio. I started doing that at christmas 1991. I took until Easter 1992! Writing the Sample Editor was a pain! It has to do lots of odd things with memory, and in Turbo-Basic. The algorithm for reversing sample space is particularly odd! The way samples are stored means that a simple swap all the bytes around will not work, as I found out during testing. Thanks to Mike Blenkiron for spotting that it didn't come close to working! It has to rotate bits within the bytes as well as reverse bytes, which is why it takes so long! Another complication was over "pages". When you edit a Sample Editor page the program has to calculate the actual memory page where it will be. Not as easy as it might sound! The copy page functions were also complicated to write. Moving big chunks of memory around is hard!¢¢Writing the Tune Compiler was fairly straight forward, and it worked pretty much first time!¢¢The absolute "biggy" was the tune creation system. Originally, this was being developed with a nice front end, where you picked notes with a joystick and was all very nice. However, for samples you need that little more control. Something more powerful was needed. In early June 1992, I started scribbling down ideas for a language. After a lot of work, LIDS popped out of the scribble about a month later! This was to be an easy to use language to allow you to create tunes for playing using samples. It looked good on paper, but I needed to write a compiler for it! It took a week to get a very basic compiler working. This had no repeats, ties, speed, or any other flashy techniques! It was primitive, but it worked! It didn't do much though. It didn't do anything clever with the samples to make high notes play the same speed as lower notes. This was the next step. The compiler now did all this while it was turning LIDS programs into tune files.¢¢I soon realised that there was no easy way to type and edit programs. So, I got to work on a text editor. This is a very simple line editor, with all the usual delete, edit, insert, list, append, list, functions. Writing this was a PAIN! It is all wacky string handling like you've never seen it before! It took 3 weeks to get a working version. I then thought it would be nice to have this within the compiler. An idea I put on ice until I'd finished the compiler!¢¢I now got back to work on the compiler. I needed to add repeats which I did. I then thought about tied notes, and designed a way of handling those which went nicely into the compiler. I then added the SPEED command for handling tempo. This was quite easy really. Then I decided to tackle the problem of different time signatures. Not an easy one this! I added a command called SIG which attempts to handle time signatures with no work on the programmers part! It's not always 100% successful though!¢¢While writing the compiler, I was also refining some of my ideas about Digi-Studio, so I had to keep trying lots of tunes out to get as much "test data" as possible to try them out as I went along. It was quite difficult to get the timings working properly!¢¢After finishing the compiler, it was time to merge the text editor into it! CRASH! Everything failed to work. There were memory problems (the program and its storage needs about 23K), and loads of conflicts with variables. Also, some line numbers went all odd when they were re-numbered, so some sections of code simply refused to work like they did before!! Very odd, but then Turbo-Basic isn't bug free! It took one heck of a lot of hard work, late nights, and sweat to get it working! I was still de-bugging it just a few days before release! I'm not 100% sure it is totally bug free. That's why I offer free (well, you have to pay for disk and postage!) updates to LIDS. Hopefully, I will add in more features and get rid of any bugs that come to light. Don't let this put you off buying Digi-Studio! LIDS works perfectly well, and I'm sure any bugs that do come to light will be very minor ones!¢¢This time, I was writing the manual at the same time as writing the software. In fact, I started writing some sections of the manual before I started the software (an old IBM technique, well known in the world of professional software engineering! Just thought I'd try it on the 'ol 8-bit!). The manual started getting longer and longer. It ended up at 37 pages of text, and 7 pages of appendices. And that's 37 pages of densely packed 11 point text, none of this big gaps and 10 lines to a page like the Atari manuals of old!! This manual is a wapper! It took me 1 1/2 hours just to read it, and over a week to spot the typos! The section on reading music was difficult to write. Although I am a formally trained musician (with several qualifications in music), it would be difficult to explain some odd terms and ideas to the man on the street! So, it was down to the library to get some books on the subject! The book I found useful, and which I would reccommend you have a look at, is "Music in the classroom" by B. Rainbow. ISBN: 0-435-81746-9. I would particularly refer you to chapter 4. Also, "A new dictionary of music" by A. Jacobs is also a useful reference if you want to know more! Appendix C of the manual is where all the actual music examples are, so these were cut and pasted with manuscript paper. Appendix D contains some actual music along with the corresponding LIDS programs. I thought this would be a useful addition to clarify some of the things I talk about in the Reading Music section of the manual.¢¢One thing people moaned about with the manuals for packages 1 and 1.5, was that the text was hard to read. That's because they were reduced to A5 size. So, I decided to produce this manual as a full A4 sized manual with a plastic spine to hold the sheets together. This can easily be removed so you can put the manual in a ring binder if you like.¢¢So, what's next for Digi-Studio? Well, the thing I'd really like to have a crack at is a 3-D landscaper for sound. This is done on some VERY expensive synths. This is where you define a start and end page of a sample space, and the computer fills in the rest of the sample space by slowly tending the start page towards the end page. The graphical representation of this looks like a 3-D landscape. However, with only 4-bit playback resolution, you wouldn't get much of a landscape!! It's worth a try though!¢¢Writing Digi-Studio was a task and a half! Two years work involving me and lots of other people along the way! I have already set up a dealership for it in the US, and nearly have one in Germany. It would be very nice if more people were using Digi-Studio! It's still a VERY minority piece of software at present. Go on, give it a try!!¢
