From: ags@scs.carleton.ca (Alexander G. M. Smith)
Subject: Re: HELP: Sound Digitizers
Keywords: Please help me decide. . .
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Date: Sun, 6 Sep 1992 15:59:57 GMT

In article <3SEP199220531326@ulkyvx02.louisville.edu> rtsumn01@ulkyvx02.louisville.edu (Shaitan) writes:
>I'm in the market for a sound digitizer and was wondering if A-Sound Elite or
>Digital Sound Studio was the better one to get (or even something else), along
>with the most notable pros & cons of each.  Thanks for your help and also
>thanks to those who replied to my original question.

Ok, here's some stuff off the back of the A-Sound Elite box and the
manual:

What it is: stereo sound sample editor and digitizer program, works with
standard (AMAS, SoundMaster and other parallel port audio digitizer
hardware) and the nonstandard (PerfectSound 3 hardware). 

Sound formats: IFF 8SVX (up to 7 octaves), IFF 16 bit, Sonix (up to 5
octaves), raw 8 and 16 bit, self playing executable. 

Editor: 32 separate tracks (you select one as the current track to work
on), 8/16 bit, mono/stereo, copy buffer (cut / paste usage), some really
good controls for selecting and extending / shrinking a range (that
feature is worth a lot in practice, they just feel "right"), undo,
variable zoom sound graph (dual for stereo), digital display of start
time / sample count / length of range etc. for accurate timing (I find
it useful for doing sound track timing - makes it easy to have an effect
end at a particular time when mixing it into the main track). 

Loops: There's a lot of sequenced loop stuff for making a tune out of a
single sample.  I don't use it so I can't say much about it. 

ARexx: zillions of ARexx commands and the matching chunk of
documentation in the manual.  Can control it externally or invoke ARexx
macros (there is a menu for your macros) to do things that you want to
do frequently. 

Effects: cross fade, fade in and out, disguise, mix (the one I use the
most), click (wasn't someone asking for a way to remove pops from a
sample recently?) and comb filters, low and high pass filters,
re-sampling (change the number of samples per second without changing
the pitch of the sample, has a nice requestor where you specify the
target frequency by any of three methods: hardware period register
value, samples per second, note and octave), DC offset and auto center,
echo, reverb, double-track, subtract, reverse, amplify and attenuate,
and a few other ones that are neat but probably not important. 

Sampling: Maximum rate is over 100kHz, if you have the processor and
audio digitizer for it.  Real time oscilloscope for monitoring volume
levels, records to memory or directly to disk - floppy disk only. 

I like A-Sound Elite, it does what I need and it does it well.  My main
quibble is that it requires a contiguous memory block for each sample. 
Fortunately, this can be a fast ram memory block (thus my largest sample
size is about 3 meg after Workbench and disk buffers have sucked up
space from the 4 meg of fast ram in my A2000).  I'd really like to see a
sound editor that uses virtual memory techniques or at least allows a
single sample to be scattered around the computers memory. 

- Alex
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.audio