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shap Full Member
Joined: 09 Apr 2011 Posts: 194 Location: US northwest
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Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2011 1:22 am Post subject: |
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I'm interested in this too. Most of what I do is purely acoustic on the one hand, or DAW-based on the other. Pragmatically that means I don't do a whole lot of this sort of organizing on the keyboard, because it mostly ends up in my working files within the DAW. I'm looking at keyboards from a fresh view these days, so I'm interested in how people manage these issues. _________________ Motif XF8, Kronos-88 (ordered), V-Synth GT, DT-Extreme eDrums
PC Core i7-920/24GB/3TB (2x)
Motu 2408mk3 + 24I/O
Sonar Producer, everything EastWest
Brian Moore iGuitar+Roland GI-20, Composite Acoustics 6, 12 string guitars, Multiple Ovations from when they were still worth it
Presonus Eureka (2x), TC Helicon VoiceOne
ADAM A7's and JBL 4328Ps, each for its purpose
Border Collies + Misc. Squeaky Toys |
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Randelph Platinum Member
Joined: 18 Oct 2008 Posts: 604 Location: San Francisco, CA
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Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2011 1:39 am Post subject: |
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shap wrote: | I'm interested in this too. Most of what I do is purely acoustic on the one hand, or DAW-based on the other. Pragmatically that means I don't do a whole lot of this sort of organizing on the keyboard, because it mostly ends up in my working files within the DAW. I'm looking at keyboards from a fresh view these days, so I'm interested in how people manage these issues. |
With a lot of non-musical work. Though things are getting better.
When I had the Motif XS, they had no way at the time to manage the samples, so even though it was a good thing they gave us hundreds of megabytes of samples, there was no direct way at the time to create an organization of the samples without incredible workarounds that were waaaay too much hassle. I understand now the John Melas editor/librarian works with samples, and I believe even Yamaha stepped up to the plate.
But I guess due to the cost of memory and other considerations, so many things are made harder:
1. Instead of storing the Programs used in Combis within the Combis themselves, you're stuck with with having to change the Program itself if it needs extensive editing, which also means you can't freely move Programs around 'cause the Combi just looks to the Program slot for its lookup.
2. All of these workstations, to my knowledge, require SAVE ALL commands in order to make room for special projects, or like the Kronos recent discussions, there's only 1? free bank of unused Program space. How is anybody supposed to remember everything that's in an ALL file? It'd be great if there was a lot more Program storage onboard.
3. Most workstations do not have fx as part of the Program itself. It's great to see with the Kronos that the EPs and Organ have fx as part of the Program itself!
And so on.
Fortunately, the new Editor for the Kronos is supposed to have a decent Librarian as well.
Randy _________________ Keyboards: Kawai ES920 / Casio CT-X5000
Instruments: Keys / Alto Recorder and Melodica |
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shap Full Member
Joined: 09 Apr 2011 Posts: 194 Location: US northwest
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Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2011 7:02 am Post subject: |
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Randelph wrote: | When I had the Motif XS, they had no way at the time to manage the samples, so even though it was a good thing they gave us hundreds of megabytes of samples, there was no direct way at the time to create an organization of the samples without incredible workarounds that were waaaay too much hassle. I understand now the John Melas editor/librarian works with samples, and I believe even Yamaha stepped up to the plate. |
It's funny. Right about the time I would have jumped into that part of the swamp I jumped instead into orchestral VSTi's. For gigging purposes I'm mostly an acoustic guitar player and piano abuser, so I guess I never got educated here.
Like I say, I'm going back to look again with a vengeance. It's all Stephen Kay's fault, really. In a very gentle, un-imposing way, he quietly pointed out a completely self-evident aircraft-carrier sized hole in my thinking on something, which I'm now trying to get my head around correcting, which is in turn going to have me dragging myself through this particular swamp pretty hard, however belatedly.
Randelph wrote: | But I guess due to the cost of memory and other considerations, so many things are made harder:
1. Instead of storing the Programs used in Combis within the Combis themselves, you're stuck with with having to change the Program itself if it needs extensive editing, which also means you can't freely move Programs around 'cause the Combi just looks to the Program slot for its lookup.
2. All of these workstations, to my knowledge, require SAVE ALL commands in order to make room for special projects, or like the Kronos recent discussions, there's only 1? free bank of unused Program space. How is anybody supposed to remember everything that's in an ALL file? It'd be great if there was a lot more Program storage onboard.
3. Most workstations do not have fx as part of the Program itself. It's great to see with the Kronos that the EPs and Organ have fx as part of the Program itself!
And so on.
Fortunately, the new Editor for the Kronos is supposed to have a decent Librarian as well. |
So I'm not sure I look forward to learning about that, but I guess I'm going to.
Long ago and in another lifetime, these sorts of problems were pretty common place in the LISP and Smalltalk world. You'd have several inter-pointing sets of resources. You'd want to save a sub-graph and send it to a machine that might be missing some or all of the pieces. But on the other hand, you didn't want to load things in duplicate if they already existed at the target machine. Especially not large constant data (like waveforms).
The usual solution is to emit your transfer format (the serialization) using abstract resource names rather than location numbers, and then "resolve" the abstract names on re-load. This gives you a place to stand to notice what you already had.
Note that human-centric names are bad abstract names, because human names frequently collide. There are techniques today for doing this kind of thing using cryptographic hashes on the objects. That approach actually works quite well, and provides a very nice integrity check for free.
The thing you never want to do is refer to something in the interchange format as "the thing in slot 5", because (a) slot 5 is probably over-writable, and (b) in cases of backwards portability, slot 5 on the destination device may mean something else. But in the word of synthesizers, "the thing in slot 5" approach got adopted and carved in stone very early.
When I look at synth data structures, I often find that I have to whack myself on the head and remind myself that the people who built this stuff either (in some cases) didn't know the techniques that many programmers considered common by the early 1980's, or were under severe space constraints and felt they couldn't afford the space resources to do better. Very often the latter. Space constraints are all over the MIDI protocol, and showed up as an issue in the synchronization protocol for the Palm Pilot, for example. Later stuff tended to carry forward using the older tried-and-true approaches, and here we are. _________________ Motif XF8, Kronos-88 (ordered), V-Synth GT, DT-Extreme eDrums
PC Core i7-920/24GB/3TB (2x)
Motu 2408mk3 + 24I/O
Sonar Producer, everything EastWest
Brian Moore iGuitar+Roland GI-20, Composite Acoustics 6, 12 string guitars, Multiple Ovations from when they were still worth it
Presonus Eureka (2x), TC Helicon VoiceOne
ADAM A7's and JBL 4328Ps, each for its purpose
Border Collies + Misc. Squeaky Toys |
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Randelph Platinum Member
Joined: 18 Oct 2008 Posts: 604 Location: San Francisco, CA
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Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2011 6:07 pm Post subject: |
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Shap wrote:
Quote: | When I look at synth data structures, I often find that I have to whack myself on the head and remind myself that the people who built this stuff either (in some cases) didn't know the techniques that many programmers considered common by the early 1980's, or were under severe space constraints and felt they couldn't afford the space resources to do better. Very often the latter.
Space constraints are all over the MIDI protocol, and showed up as an issue in the synchronization protocol for the Palm Pilot, for example. Later stuff tended to carry forward using the older tried-and-true approaches, and here we are. |
I believe there were many hardware constraints all along- 8 bit sampling? 4 MB of total ROM for onboard samples? Small patch banks? Stingy amount of memory for onboard sequencing? Small industry making do with scraps left over from the computer industry, which was setting the standards, very few of them considerate of the tight timing demands of digital audio, which was as nascent as the computers-?
When I had my Motif XS, I documented the absolute nightmare workaround hassles of sample management on the XS, and Bad Mister, the resident Yamaha guru over at Motifator finally replied that Yamaha, once upon a time with the A3000? sampler, had unique ways of marking samples, so that the same sample wasn't loaded twice; but for some reason they didn't implement that feature on the XS, and it wasn't his decision to do so.
I started buying keyboards in the mid-80's which, unless you had considerable funds and loved analog, was kind of the bad old days. Your money didn't go far, the only real engines were FM (never liked that much) and analog; romplers had pathetically small samples to work with, etc.
And I think it's also a case of build once, repeat many times. From what I understand/have heard, most of the OSs for the big 4 has been in place since the late 80's, early 90's. It's what makes the Triton user familiar with the Kronos in a family way, and I'm sure that that familiarity is a big selling point for many.
All I really know though is my heyday of divving into technology was in my 20's and 30's. Long gone. In my 50's, I still lust/long for the high tech capabilities, like seeing a beautiful woman, but I don't have the same drive to conquer that tech. I want to play music. Learning pieces, memorizing for flawless performance- I've got a lot of songs on my list!
So it's ironic that my dream board, the one I've always wanted- super high fidelity, audio recording and decent sequencing, strong live performer, affordable- that its arrived at last in the form of the Kronos- and I'm sitting here feeling pretty happy with my simple stage keyboard! My timing is a little off!
Randy _________________ Keyboards: Kawai ES920 / Casio CT-X5000
Instruments: Keys / Alto Recorder and Melodica |
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