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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.audio
- Path: sparky!uunet!utcsri!torn!cunews!ags
- From: ags@scs.carleton.ca (Alexander G. M. Smith)
- Subject: Re: HELP: Sound Digitizers
- Message-ID: <1992Sep6.155957.1586@cunews.carleton.ca>
- Keywords: Please help me decide. . .
- Sender: news@cunews.carleton.ca (News Administrator)
- Organization: School of Computer Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
- References: <3SEP199220531326@ulkyvx02.louisville.edu>
- Date: Sun, 6 Sep 1992 15:59:57 GMT
- Lines: 56
-
- In article <3SEP199220531326@ulkyvx02.louisville.edu> rtsumn01@ulkyvx02.louisville.edu (Shaitan) writes:
- >I'm in the market for a sound digitizer and was wondering if A-Sound Elite or
- >Digital Sound Studio was the better one to get (or even something else), along
- >with the most notable pros & cons of each. Thanks for your help and also
- >thanks to those who replied to my original question.
-
- Ok, here's some stuff off the back of the A-Sound Elite box and the
- manual:
-
- What it is: stereo sound sample editor and digitizer program, works with
- standard (AMAS, SoundMaster and other parallel port audio digitizer
- hardware) and the nonstandard (PerfectSound 3 hardware).
-
- Sound formats: IFF 8SVX (up to 7 octaves), IFF 16 bit, Sonix (up to 5
- octaves), raw 8 and 16 bit, self playing executable.
-
- Editor: 32 separate tracks (you select one as the current track to work
- on), 8/16 bit, mono/stereo, copy buffer (cut / paste usage), some really
- good controls for selecting and extending / shrinking a range (that
- feature is worth a lot in practice, they just feel "right"), undo,
- variable zoom sound graph (dual for stereo), digital display of start
- time / sample count / length of range etc. for accurate timing (I find
- it useful for doing sound track timing - makes it easy to have an effect
- end at a particular time when mixing it into the main track).
-
- Loops: There's a lot of sequenced loop stuff for making a tune out of a
- single sample. I don't use it so I can't say much about it.
-
- ARexx: zillions of ARexx commands and the matching chunk of
- documentation in the manual. Can control it externally or invoke ARexx
- macros (there is a menu for your macros) to do things that you want to
- do frequently.
-
- Effects: cross fade, fade in and out, disguise, mix (the one I use the
- most), click (wasn't someone asking for a way to remove pops from a
- sample recently?) and comb filters, low and high pass filters,
- re-sampling (change the number of samples per second without changing
- the pitch of the sample, has a nice requestor where you specify the
- target frequency by any of three methods: hardware period register
- value, samples per second, note and octave), DC offset and auto center,
- echo, reverb, double-track, subtract, reverse, amplify and attenuate,
- and a few other ones that are neat but probably not important.
-
- Sampling: Maximum rate is over 100kHz, if you have the processor and
- audio digitizer for it. Real time oscilloscope for monitoring volume
- levels, records to memory or directly to disk - floppy disk only.
-
- I like A-Sound Elite, it does what I need and it does it well. My main
- quibble is that it requires a contiguous memory block for each sample.
- Fortunately, this can be a fast ram memory block (thus my largest sample
- size is about 3 meg after Workbench and disk buffers have sucked up
- space from the 4 meg of fast ram in my A2000). I'd really like to see a
- sound editor that uses virtual memory techniques or at least allows a
- single sample to be scattered around the computers memory.
-
- - Alex
-