Hi Starkeeper,
the DGX served it's purpose. We were living between 2 residences for a few months. So I had the DGX in one house & the Clavinova setup at home.
I thought I could use it as a controller, and take it away on holidays etc, but discovered by the time I loaded up the car with pets , luggage etc there was no room left for hubby, unfortunately I need him to do the driving ( haa haa)
I'll probably just get a little 37 or 49 note controller, I've got a good set of headphones and I'm waiting for my new audigy sound card to arrive for my laptop. So I'll be truly portable. And yes, i am quite impressed with the new fonts.

best wishes
Rikki

Hi Frank,
how have you been.
What sort of won me over again was the "another xg font". The piano sound in it is quite reasonable. Possibly because it sounds a bit more like my Clavinova's piano sounds. I may have to check that GM500 disk out one of these days and improve my wavetable.

Is the conversion process terribly difficult?

Don't get too excited Frank, I'm only getting a 37 or 49 note one, nothing too fancy. I want it for portability, discovered my dgx 76 note wasn't portable enough ( haahaa)
best wishes
Rikki
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Frank L. Rosenthal:
[B]

Hi Frank,
Kontakt, I assume that's one of the synths you need a second harddrive for. ( I've even been checking into one of those)

Isn't converting all those drum styles to gm going to be an awful lot of work?

I worked out a way of doing it in OMB, you probably have too.

best wishes
Rikki

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Frank L. Rosenthal:
[B]

Rikki, I guess your are right. I won't rest until you acquire a very high quality 76 note controller which replaces all your keys including your Clavinova. Then and only then will we beable to say that Rikki has arrived and the rest of the world is standing in her shadow!!! One could say this even if she kept a 49 key controller for travel or other purposes.

Yes, it is alot of work to convert the GM500 wavetable to the Kontakt format (or Soundfont). The other disadvantage is the the size (500mb). This ideally should reside in your computers memory for use by your accompaniment software. The larger the size the longer it takes to load the wavetable and the less room for other things. Oh well!!!

And yes, it is alot of work changing all the styles to meet the GM standard. However, doing so (once) frees you to use many available GM wavetables. You may still need to change volume levels and effects but this is easy to do.

Yes, if you use Kontakt and very high quality instruments then you need to have second HD from which such instruments are streamed as you play.

But you can stay with your Another XG wavetable and only modify or replace those instruments you feel need to be improved.

Rikki,
I would not recommend a 49 note controller either. You need the extra keys for fills, sync start, stop, etc. You will have to have your computer keyboard close by to do those things. There was a picture a while back of a controler with a place on top of it for a computer keyboard. That would be excellent.
Living between two residences sounds familiar. I live in the country on the weekends and board in the city during the week. This is why I have two keyboards.
Frank,
What is the GM500?
I know you have explained this before, but could you explain again why Yamaha styles (drums especially) cause a problem when using a GM sound set. Speak s-l-o-w-l-y so I can understand completely. How do you correct this.
Starkeeper

Starkeeper, the GM500 is a 500mb General Midi Wavetable (128 instruments & Drumkit). Furthermore, this wavetable is designed to work in the GigaStudio soft synth and would need to be converted to whatever synth you may be using (soundfont, kontakt, etc.). Since GM is different from XG in the kind and number of instruments and the drum instruments are arranged differenctly within the kits you would need to change the styles so that they sound properly, e.g., snare drum rather than a dog howling or something like that or a piano playing rather than a drumkit. These changes are easy to make but they are time consuming.

Hi Frank,
at the moment I still mainly play piano based styles ( pianist at heart, but without the neccesary skills & talent).

Have I got this right? I bought a laptop with 512mb memory , the GM500 wavetable would actually use up 500mb of that memory, leaving me with 12mb . Apart from 500mb taking a long time to load, I wouldn't have enough memory left to run OMB & forte ( and even windows?? Does windows use part of my 512mb memory also).
So, if I tried to improve only some of the voices in the xg font, I'd have to keep it reasonably small or I'd run out of memory??
The larger the font, does it actually slow down the performance of the computer ie when I'm using OMB would it cause gliches etc, or is just that a large font needs longer to load? Sorry for all the questions Frank, but I don't know a great deal about the actual workings of a computer.

I can now see why audio streaming may be a good option if I want to get really good quality.

You're right, GM probably is the way to go , I was getting lazy. If I'm going to the trouble of converting velocities, converting instruments isn't that much extra work.
I've also got the Another GS Font as well/.

best wishes
Rikki

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Frank L. Rosenthal:
[B].

Hi Starkeeper,
I actually use my laptops keyboard for fills , start stop etc I normally play in full piano mode, so I can't assign these functions to my piano keys.

When travelling , I don't really need the controller for realtime playing, just to use it for style editing, practicing melodies ( with Busker) etc . I'd need at least 76 notes to use one properly, and I'd run into the same problem that I had with the dgx, not enough room in the car.

best wishes
Rikki

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Starkeeper:
[B]Rikki,

Rikki, yes the best approach is to have all of the 500mb wavetable loaded given it needs to respond very quickly to program changes (voice changes) within each style or midi file. You don't want any delays due to this. It wouldn't slow down the computer but it certainly will consume all the memory of your laptop. If program changes were not required you could then setup suitable synths to stream from the hard drive with very little of each instrument loaded to memory. Synths which designed to stream from the HD include Kontakt, Halion and GigaStudio.

That's why I compromised and only replaced those instruments that I needed in sYnerGi GS. This kept the size to 128mb.

So if you want to successfully do it the way I have then you need memory closer to 2GB. Again it dosen't slow the computer down. The thing that is hard on the processor is a high quality reverb. Effects can get the audio to break up. Ordinary effects like you find in Yamaha keyboards would not even be noticed by today's high speed computers. I use moderate to high quality effects - it makes a big difference in the quality of the audio output.

Hi Frank,
Hi Frank,
re your comment below in regards to streaming,
you are reffering to an external hard drive??

Actually I really don't use that many instruments within a style, mainly piano, bass, drums, guitar & strings, sometimes brass & woodwinds. I set up the styles to try & avoid program changes within the various style parts. So I'd really only have to upgrade a few instruments.

Looks like I'll have to stick to low grade effects, "eek" 2 gigs on my laptop, unfortunately still a bit too pricey, but fortunately prices appear to keep dropping.
Some day, who knows.

best wishes
Rikki

p.s. how's your wife, last time we spoke she wasn't too well.


[QUOTE]Originally posted by Frank L. Rosenthal:
[B]the best approach is to have all of the 500mb wavetable loaded
If program changes were not required you could then setup suitable synths to stream from the hard drive with very little of each instrument loaded to memory.