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Text File | 1990-02-19 | 22KB | 408 lines

WELCOME TO VOLKAN!! This is the Volkan demonstration disk. Thank you for trying it. To run Volkan you need: IBM PC or compatible 512K Ram MPU MIDI interface Emu-Proteus or Proteus XR Features of Volkan: o Will edit all parameters with your computer that would normally be edited through the 16 character wide Proteus screen. The editors include: Preset editor, Master settings editor, User-tuning table editor, Program mapping editor. o Has a fully functional librarian that can arrange the presets JUST the way you want (or need) them. o Has a Hex dump editor. o Can GENERATE 1 or 64 presets based on parameters of existing presets o Can print any kind of Proteus sys-ex data. o Easy to use pull-down menu interface o Help screeens provide almost as much help as a Suicide Prevention Center. (Ok, it's not even close, but with 140+ help screens, the risk of user-suicide due to frustrastion caused by the product is significantly reduced) o Has keyboard short-cuts for quicker access to all functions. o Using VOLKAN /S you can use Volkan with a modified MIDI card o Comes with a 50 page printed manual describing each infinitesimal detail of Volkan Differences from commercial version: Volkan/Proteus is fully functional EXCEPT that you cannot SEND a data permanently to Proteus. You CAN send data when you are in the editor, however, to hear what your preset sounds like. The 50 page printed manual has been reduced to about 5 pages. Sorry that had to happen, but I wanted to include all of Volkan's hypertext help screens. Price: Volkan/Proteus costs $70 + $5 s/h = $75 Volkan order form Quantity Volkan/Proteus $70 x ______ = $_______ Shipping/Handling $ 5 Outside of USA and Canada add $10 = $_______ Total $_______ Send check or money order to MMI Computers 878 Via Seville Livermore, Ca 94550-5430 Make sure your money is in USA funds drawn on a USA bank. If not, I will not be able to process it. Please allow 2 weeks for delivery Send to: _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ DEMO Volkan Documentation Manual for Volkan: E-mu Proteus/1 E-mu Proteus/1 XR First Edition Volkan is Copyright (c) 1990 by MMI Computers, 878 Via Seville, Livermore, Ca, 94550-5430. All rights reserved. Proteus is a trademark of E-mu Systems, Inc. Legal Disclaimer (legalese): The Author is not liable for any damages: loss of data, hardware, financial, or otherwise, caused by the use, misuse, or abuse of this product, or any modification of this product. The Author assumes no liability for the accuracy or inaccuracy of this documentation. Legal Disclaimer (English): It is possible, and is very easy to permanently erase presets from your synthesizer. Never rush when sending data, and always back up your data. If you use Volkan with care, and think about what you are doing, and follow directions, you should have no problems. ABOUT VOLKAN Volkan is an editor/librarian designed for specific synthesizers, such as the Proteus, which allows the user to edit the synthesizer presets with a computer instead of through the tiny window present on most synthesizers. Volkan has 255 tracks in which you may save data. A track may contain one preset or a conglomerate bank of presets. A track may also contain other items, such as the user tuning table. All tracks may be edited with a specialized editor or a hex dump listing, if desired. With Volkan, at all times, pressing the F1 key will bring up a context-sensitive help screen with information pertaining to the task you are attempting to accomplish. The Guided tour -- Exploring Volkan Now, you will get some "hands on" experience of Volkan. If you are using Volkan on a floppy disk, put your Volkan back-up diskette in disk drive A:, and on the MS-DOS Command line, type Volkan and press Enter. If you are using Volkan on a hard disk, type CD C:\VOLKAN and press Enter. Next, type Volkan and press Enter. Volkan will load up and display it's title screen. Press any key (the Space Bar, for example) to proceed. If you are using Volkan on a floppy disk, take your Volkan back-up diskette #1 out of drive A:, and insert Volkan back-up diskette #2 into drive A:, and close the disk drive door. It is time to practice the commands you need to know to use Volkan. To start things off, you are in the Main Screen. From this screen, use the arrow keys to move the selection bar in corresponding directions. If you press Enter (which would normally edit whatever is under the selection bar), you will get a message from Volkan, since there is nothing to edit. Press the Enter key, just to cause Volkan to display a message. Press Enter again to leave the message. Press the F1 key to get some help. Press Esc to leave the Help Screen. Press F10 to activate the pull-down menus. The "File" menu will appear on the upper-left portion of the screen. Notice the "dead selections". Press the Up arrow key a few times, and note how the selection bar steps over the partitions and dead selections. Now, press the Down arrow key a few times and watch a similar result. Press the Left arrow key five times (go slowly) and watch the other pull-down menus activate and deactivate in succession. You should end back in the "File" menu. If you are not on the "File" menu, press the left arrow key until you are. Now press the Right arrow key three times. Notice that you are in the "Special" menu. Press the Down arrow key once. The selection bar should be highlighting "About Volkan". Press Enter. You will see the title screen again. Press Enter to proceed from the title screen. You will be placed back in the "Special" menu. Press the Right arrow key once. You have returned to the "File" menu. Press the L key on your keyboard. This will move the selection bar to "Load work file" and automatically select it. You will be asked to type in the file path. Press Enter for now. This is your first exposure to the pop-up directory. Use the arrow keys top move the selection bar up, down, left, and right. Move the selection bar to PROTEUS.VLK, and press the Enter key. Congratulations! You have just loaded your first work file from the disk drive. Wasn't that easy? Once you choose the Load command from the "File" menu, the pull-down menus will automatically deactivate thereby sending you back to the main screen. Press the F10 key to activate the pull-down menus again. Move to the Special menu. Move the selection bar to the "Show information" selection and press Enter. View this screen and press Esc to leave it. Press F10 to deactivate the pull-down menus. Now, press F2 to clear the work file. Let's configure Volkan. Hook up your Proteus MIDI "Out" connector to the computer's MIDI "In" connector and your Proteus MIDI "In" connector to your computer's MIDI "Out" connector. Turn the power to your Proteus on, and when it has warmed up, press the "Master" button. Dial in the MIDI Mode/ID screen, and look at the ID number. Now, press Alt-V on your keyboard, followed by the Enter key. Type the number you see on your Proteus screen into Volkan, and press Enter when done. Press F10 to leave the configuration. Press the Master button on Proteus to leave the Master settings. Move the selection bar to track number 1 and press the T key, followed by the R key. This will load information from Proteus into Volkan. To select which information to receive, move the selection bar to User Presets, and press Enter. The User Presets should now be loading from Proteus to Volkan. After the presets are loaded, you will get a confirmation screen which says "16960 bytes received successfully". Volkan will say this because the help level is set to Novice. When you become familiar with Volkan, these confirmation screens become a pain in the neck. Fortunately, all you need to do to turn them off is to change your help level to Intermediate via the Configure Volkan command. Move the selection bar to the Primary Name column, if it isn't already there. Press the Enter key to edit it. Type in something like, Original presets. Press Enter after you type in the new name. Press the F key to go to the file menu. Press the S key to save this file. Since the name of the file is NONAME.VLK, save will ask you for another name. Type in something like BACKUP and press Enter. You have now backed up the original user presets with Volkan. This is IMPORTANT. Make as many backup copies as you can; you can never be TOO safe. Now that you have backed things up, move the selection bar to track number 1, and let's GENERATE a track. Press E to go to the Edit menu. Press G to generate a track. Volkan will ask you which track to generate to. Type in 2 and press Enter. Volkan will ask you whether you want 1 or 64 patches generated. Use the arrow keys to select 64, and press Enter to proceed. Volkan will now generate 64 presets onto track 2. When it is done, move the selection bar to track 2. Press T to select the Transfer sub-menu, and press S to send the current track (track 2). Now, unplug the MIDI "In" on your Proteus, and plug your MIDI keyboard to the Proteus MIDI "In". Dial in preset number 64. It will have a strange (random) name. Try out all of these randomly generated presets, writing down on a piece of paper which one(s) sound good, and which one(s) would only need a little editing to sound good. Now that you know which presets you like, hook up your Proteus again (Proteus "In" to MPU "Out"; Proteus "Out" to MPU "In"). Move to track 3, and receive into that track your favorite preset, by pressing Alt-R (for receive) and selecting the Receive patch option. Press Alt-T to call Volkan's track editor. Press the F2 key to show all parameters to the patch. Look in the upper left corner where the link values are presented (Link 1, Link 2, and Link 3). Write those links down on the paper. Press Esc twice; once to leave the show patch screen, once to leave the editor. If your preset is linked to another preset, send the linked preset to track 4 (and tracks 5 and 6, if the preset has multiple links). How do you erase a track? Simple. Move the selection bar to track 2 and press the E key. This will bring up the edit sub-menu. Press the K key to kill the current track. You will be asked if you are sure you want to kill the current track. Press Enter to confirm. The track will now be empty. The presets you generated are now gone from your computer. The computer has no way of restoring these presets by itself. But there is a way to restore them. Keep the selection bar on track 2, and press Alt-R to receive the user presets. Move the selection bar on user presets and press Enter. The user presets will now be loaded into track 2. Presto! These presets will be the ones generated by track 1. Another useful feature you might want to know about is the track copy. Move the selection bar to track 3. Press E, then C. Volkan will ask you which track to put the copy onto. Type 10 and press Enter. Track 3 will have a duplicate of itself on track 10. There is no practical purpose for the duplicate on track 10, so a good exercise for you would be to Kill track 10 without any assistance. Do not proceed with this tutorial until doing so. Another feature you must learn is to save to a different file name. If you saved your work file right now, it would be saved to BACKUP.VLK. Now, this wouldn't be disastrous if you saved to that name, but BACKUP.VLK should contain the original Proteus presets, and nothing else. Let's save this file to GENR8TED.VLK. First, press the F key to bring up the File sub-menu, and press the W key to choose the Write to command. An input screen will pop-up asking you for the new name. Type GENR8TED and press Enter. You do not need (and are not allowed) to type in the .VLK extension. It will be automatically added for you. Now the file will be saved as GENR8TED.VLK, and on the lower right hand side of the screen you will see the word GENR8TED.VLK. There are two last features of the Volkan librarian left to discuss. They are pretty advanced, but dabbling with them now can be helpful to understanding them. These commands are the MERGE File and EXTRACT File commands. The Extract file command can be thought of as a selective Save command. It will only save the tracks that are active. It will go from track 1 to track 255 in your file, and the first ACTIVE track found in memory will be the track number 1 in the extracted file, the second ACTIVE track found will be track 2 in the extracted file, and so on. To practice with this command, we can start with a very simple exercise. You have at least 3 tracks in the current work file (GENR8TED). To make a small example, move the selection bar as far right as possible (the Active column). Move the selection bar to track number 2, and press Enter. The generated bank should now be inactive. Now it's time to extract all the active tracks (every track but track number 2). Press F to bring up the File sub-menu, and press E to execute the Extract file command. You will be asked for the new file name. Type in EXTRACT and press Enter. The file will now extract all of the ACTIVE tracks. Let's load this new file into memory. There is a short-cut to load command. The short-cut is the F3 key. Press F3 to call up the load command. Press Enter to see the directory. Press E to select EXTRACT.VLK and press Enter to load it. Volkan will say that GENR8TED has changed and will ask you if you want to save it. Press Y to save GENR8TED. EXTRACT.VLK will now be loaded into memory. It looks just like GENR8TED except that it looks like track number 2, the generated track, was erased, and the rest of the file was "moved up" one track. In general, the extract command will squeeze all the active tracks together, getting rid of all of the inactive and empty tracks in between. Now let's load up GENR8TED again. Press F3, followed by Enter, then G, then Enter. The file merge is very similar to the load command except that the memory is not erased before the file is loaded into memory; the disk file is loaded INTO the work file. Another rule is that the first non-empty track of the merge file is put into the first empty track of the work file, the second non-empty track of the merge file will be loaded into the second empty track in memory. For this example, we're going to merge EXTRACT into GENR8TED. In order to make the merge more meaningful, we'll have to fragment (intersperse empty tracks among non-empty tracks) GENR8TED a little bit. Move the selection bar to track 3. Press Alt-K to kill the track. Now, press the F key to call up the File sub-menu, and press M to start the merge. You will get a file mask box that is similar to the load command. Press Enter. You will now see a pop-up directory. Press E to select EXTRACT.VLK and press Enter. The file EXTRACT will now merge itself into memory. You will notice that track 3 is not empty anymore. Instead, it will contain the User presets from track 1 of EXTRACT. The other tracks will appear below where the last track was. Now, let's explore the librarian. Load the file EXTRACT.VLK using the F3 key. You will be asked whether or not to save GENR8TED.VLK. Select NO, and press Enter, since GENR8TED is already saved without the excess tracks. With the selection bar on your original user presets, press Alt-L. The librarian will pop-up, with a listing of all the presets in the track. With this example of the librarian, NOTHING WILL BE SAVED PERMANENTLY, so don't be afraid to modify the file. Without moving the selection bar, press M to memorize the first preset. You will get a confirmation message that it was put in slot 0 (The slots are numbered 0-9). Press Enter. Move the selection bar down a few presets and press M again. The preset under the selection bar will be in slot 1. Press Enter. Move back up to the top-left corner again. Press C to copy a preset from the memory bank to the selection bar. Press 1 to select the other preset. Notice that the other preset appears in two locations. Move the selection bar again to the place where you memorized the preset in slot 1. Press C to copy another preset. This time press the 0 key. Notice how we've swapped the order of these two presets! Their preset numbers aren't in order, but we'll fix that in a minute. Now that we have used the memory banks, let's forget what we have memorized. Press the F key. From the listing of the memory bank, press the 1 key. That preset is now "forgotten". Press F again. Press the 0 key. The memory bank is now empty. Move the selection bar to your least favorite preset. Press the E key to erase it. Notice the effect. You will find many uses for this feature. Move the selection bar to your most favorite preset. Press the X key to "export" it. Notice what happens. You are back in the Volkan librarian. Without moving the selection bar, press Alt-M to memorize the current track. Move the selection bar back to the user presets we were working with and press Alt-L. Find the preset you erased and press the C key. Presto! The track you memorized in the Volkan librarian is still there. Press 0 to copy. In general, whenever you memorize something, or wherever you memorize something, it will be in Volkan's memory bank until you quit to DOS. That means after all of the loading and saving of many files the preset memorized will still be there. For an exercise, erase the preset currently in the memory bank. The last feature is the renumbering. The two presets that are not in the right order are messing things up here. To fix this problem, press R to renumber the whole bank. You will be asked what number to start from. Choose the #64...#127 option. Now the preset bank is perfect. You would find many uses for this renumbering. For example, if you want to modify the factory presets (which are permanently wired into Proteus), you would have to renumber them to send the bank to Proteus. Note that when you renumber, if there are any links in the bank that point to another link in the bank, they will be changed also. This would be correct, but the some links may incorrect if you renumber more than once. Now you have explored all of the library functions. Press Esc to quit the library. Press F2 to erase the work file from memory. Press N when it asks if you want to save the file. From here you may press Alt-X to exit, or you could continue working on the commands you have just learned. You have learned all of Volkan's major commands. Once you are familiar with these commands, you should move on to editing a track. This concludes the DEMO documentation. Thank you for using Volkan.