Is anyone interested in hosting a site to put AUDIO clips of each arranger's ROM styles on?

I know very little about web-hosting, so I don't know how to do this for myself, but perhaps a more tech savvy person could put something together. Let me explain what this is for...

One of the main difficulties I find in converting styles from one arranger to another is I seldom have a clue as to what the original sounded like! Drum sounds, overall mix, how they all react and sound together, little of this is apparent when you receive a converted style. You are basically on your own, unless you are fortunate enough to have a friend with the actual source styles.

But you DO.... us! But how do we get access to this? Well perhaps a site dedicated to short, audio only (so as not to infringe copyright) clips of the styles, in mp3 format.

That's a lot of data, you might say... Perhaps not TOO much, if we do it carefully.

First of all, this is NOT for a record company, so a lower bitrate mp3 would provide all the info we need. Probably 128kbps would be sufficient, maybe as low as 96kbps could work, but it would save us little. I'd prefer 128kbps, anyway. This would nearly halve the data of a 256kbps 'quality' recording, and all the primary info you are after would still be more than apparent..

Secondly, you don't need complete performances. A C major chord would still provide all the info (you rarely get completely different instruments or mixes on different chord types), and for mix and tone purposes, you don't even need the entire loop. Either two or four bars per Variation would be sufficient. Nor would you need ALL the Intros and Endings. Usually, the most complex ones have ALL the elements of the simpler ones in them.

So I imagine a format of (just the ROM styles, no tweaks)

Intro 4 (or whatever is the most complex one on your arranger)
Var 1 4 bars (or only two if it is a short loop)
Fill up
Var 2 4 bars (ditto)
Fill up
Var 3 ditto
Fill up
Var 4 ditto
Ending 4 (or whatever is the most complex one on your arranger)

Fill downs generally use the same sounds as fill ups, so probably no need for them. Korg users, with fewer fills could get them ALL in!

So this come to a total of 16 bars of variations, and the fills, ins and ends, probably 32 bars total. At a 128kbps encoding, this would be roughly 500k per style.

OK, you say, seems like a LOT of work, though (most arrangers have up to 300 styles)... Well, perhaps not, IF we divide it up. Quite a lot of us have got mp3 audio recording capabilities in our arrangers. Certainly all the Yamaha users do, and most of the Korg (I suggest we start with current arrangers, and add legacy ones as demand needs), So that leaves us poor Roland guys with the only need to hook up a recorder. Well, I just got an H2, so no problem on the G70 end of things...

I am suggesting that, if we decide to do this thing, we get a list of owners that are willing to put a few hours simple work in, and then divide up the ROM styles into categories. One person does the Swing category, another the Rock, etc., up to as many as we can get... So no-one has to do the WHOLE thing, if they don't want to!

Basically, you sit there with the C chord as part of the memory (if your arranger holds the chord as you change styles), hit the style, hit Intro 4 hit Play, and just step through the variations with Auto fill on, hit Ending 4 and stop recording. Maybe a minute's work. Save the file with the style name, and on to the next one. An hour's work might be 30 styles or more. With multiple people working on this, I don't see anyone having to dedicate all THAT much time to it...

We then upload the labeled files to the server, and voilå! No more EVER having to guess what that style you got was supposed to sound like! This would make conversion SO much easier, IMO.

So.... how about it, folks? Do any of you think you could benefit from such a project, and might be persuaded to participate..? I think there are certainly enough of us here that individually it shouldn't be too much of a burden, if we get enough on board...

Comments, suggestions, volunteers....

www.4shared.com gives you 5GB of free space to upload and download files (Or stream them) and you can set up folders for whatever you want.
This is probably the best bet, and providing you log on at least once a month the files will stay there forever.
One Suggestion

Bill


[This message has been edited by abacus (edited 04-09-2008).]

1) There's Youtube, I believe anyone can upload a "video" file with NO video at all...equip it with the required keywords, like "style" "tyros" "G70" and so on, and make it's presence known to the others here

2) Someone (may be you Diki), set up a GMAIL account, using a unique and easy to remember name like "ARRANGER-STYLE-AUDIO-CLIPS" and "SYNTHZONE" as password, and everyone should e-mail there his/her clips for all to log on and hear, again with reasonable subject lines like "Yamaha Tyros Beguine 1", so everyone logging in will be able to find what he wants and hear it.

To cut a long story short, I created a GMAIL account
you mail what you want to
arranger.style.audio.clips.1 followed by the @gmail DOT com

for everyone who wishes to check what has been posted, log to www.gmail.com:
username is arranger.style.audio.clips.1 and the pass is synthzone.1

sorry about the points, gmail does not allow dashes or underscores...

the .1 in bothe the name and tha pass are there so if (fat chance) this one fills up, we can create a .2 account and so on.

ok everyone?

Bill. I stand corrected, but I think 4shared only allows loads of 10mb each time so files would have to be split ?.

Hi Graham
The upload size was upgraded to 100MB earlier this year.
I use it regularly.
Regards

Bill

Bill. Thanks for the info....I'm now corrected...Ha!!!

I host all types of content for arranger keyboards at my www.arrangerworld.com site.

I'm really surprised more members don't participate over there as we have the ability to store user published articles, styles, sounds, midi files, photos, etc.

All are welcome !

------------------
Al Giordano
http://www.arrangerworld.com


Korg Pa2xpro, Roland VK8-M, DW Collectors Series Drums, Roland TD-12 Vdrums, Roland SPD-S.

Al,

Thanks for the reminder. I forgot about your site and just re-registered Great site with lots of info - thanks!

zuki

Well, thank you for all the suggestions about storage...

We may have a problem, though, with the free storage sites. If you allow for my rough estimate on file size, and let's be generous, to allow for long intros and endings, slower tempo styles, etc., and say at MOST, they would be 1MB each. Now 300 styles would take up 300MB (although I think 200MB is a more real-world estimate). Now that's just ONE arranger! So you have to multiply that by the number of arrangers recorded. Let's examine that...

I would say for this to be of use, most of the main TOTL and midline arrangers need representing, so my list would probably run;

Tyros2
S900
PA800 (unless they are identical with PA2X)
PA2X
PA1X (that's what most of the converted Korg styles are from, so far)
G70
E80
SD-1 (is SD-5 essentially the same styles?)

Have I missed anything major? So that's maybe seven arrangers, maybe six if S900 is close to identical to T2, maybe five if E80 and G70 can be combined (though there are drumkit differences) Let's say six...

Six arrangers, at 300MB each, that's 1.8GB. so let's call it 2GB rough estimate. That's how much hosting size we need... at a minimum. Can Arranger-world host that much data? Strangely, I mentioned this project to createsongstyles.com, the site which was originally created exactly for the purpose of style creation and conversion, but the admin seemed uninterested. Oh well...

Anyway, thanks for showing some interest. Now let's get down to the nitty gritty... plenty of responses about hosting it, but no volunteers for the recording side of things, yet...

So, would anyone be interested in helping on the recording side of things? Obviously, the more volunteers we get, the less each individual would have to do. You could either post here, or email me privately (my profile is correct). I would NOT like to start until I'm fairly sure we could complete the project... it would not be NEARLY as useful if it were simply just a few styles, from a couple of arrangers. Comprehensiveness would be the only thing to make it REALLY useful (everyone has different style and conversion needs).

So.... volunteers needed, but the work won't start until I'm sure we can complete the job, AND we have a site that can host the files for quite some time.

Let's make this happen!