I could not figure out what I was waiting for, so I bought Jammer Live. Hooking up a music keyboard to my computer is going to take some rearranging. However, you can actually play accompaniment style from a computer keyboard and pointing device. The 25 styles that come with the program are good, but of course I want more. Tools are provided for making user styles.

Knowing me, Gigasample is probably not too far in the future. Then integrating vocal harmony with the styles. :-)

Way to go Cliff! Mine has got to cross the Atlantic. I suppose that before you know it we'll have some exchange forum for JLive styles. I'm still waiting for the first reports on the Conexant GM500 library, which has its own player, so I don't even know if you need the GS to have it working with JLive!(http://www.northernsounds.com/cgibin/Ultimate.cgi?action=intro)

Clif:

Tne number of available styles seems to be a great limitation unless the style making tools are very powerful.

Would you share your experience with the latter?

Michael

elle

Jammer Live is available (only) by download. It should not matter what side of the Altantic you are on. Well, maybe payment is a problem?

Anyway, I look forward to the JammerLiveStyleExchange forum.

Oh, look, I finally made "member".

I wish it was, Cliff. I wish it was.

Dear Michael

The shortage of styles is a "short-term" problem. The styles that are available are more flexible than hardware styles. For example, they support probabilistic selection of riffs, so they are less monotonous.

In addition, Jammer Live makes it easy to mix parts of different styles. Yamaha lets you make a new style that mixes parts from different styles. But Jammer makes this much easier--it qualifies as a performance feature, not just a programming feature.

Conversion of styles, while not automated, is straightforward. The Jammer Live sytle format is a superset of Yamaha's. A Yamaha style basically includes instruments and parts. The instruments corresponding to JL's musician styles, and what the instruments play during a Yamaha part are JLs riffs. In the absence of a CASM converter, there will be tweaking necessary to get the style to function correctly. However, I would guess that all the CASM capabilities are provided in plain English by JL.

Further, Band In the Box styles should convert pretty well to JL. This would give a source of probabilistic styles.

I think the software autoaccompaniment future is bright.

Clif

Dear Frank

I appreciate your input and look forward to your review next week. Are you a gigging musician? I am just a hobbyist.

Regarding the operating system, I do find W98 to be quite stable. It does take longer to boot than a dedicated synth, so that is a small problem. I am still concerned about timing issues. I played JL from my computer keyboard while I was printing the JL help files and noted timing problems. Ok, so you will not print while you are playing. However, you might be running gigasampler. I think that if there are timing problems, they can be solved, but it may take some experience sharing.

I have a PSR-8000 and was assuming that I would upgrade in a year to the PSR-9000. Now that seems unlikely.

By the way, if you use gigasampler for maybe gigastudio, don't you have the effects you want built in. On the other hand, I like vocal harmonization and I am trying to figure out how best to integrate that with JL.

Clif

Dear Frank,
I was looking through the official gigasampler bbs and read that a laptop won't work well with gigasampler (something to do with the harddrive) and that the company recommends small computers. I forgot what they called them.
I am very interested in this gigasampler-jammerlive thing. Seems great. I also read that giga is cpu hungry & you don't always get so much polyphony from it so you'll have to check if it can run together with jammerlive.

Please keep me updated. I'm knoledge hungry!

Thank you.

------------------
Jick

Franks point about the incompatibility of Laptops and Gigasampler is discouraging. Maybe I do not really need portability, but it would be nice. Clearly high-end laptops are powerful enough for gigasampler. The problem might be power management--spinning down hard drives when not in use. Maybe not all do.

Also, do not overlook Elle's observation that the 500 MB General Midi sound set comes with its own player. So that at least for General Midi, Gigasampler is not needed.

If that is still a problem, there is a 150 MB General Midi set that could be loaded into RAM.

I guess there is another class of computers, not battery powered but small and light weight with an LCD screen built in. Sony, NEC, and I think Compaq make these. Maybe they represent the best portable Gigasampler solution.

Clif