From: gord@jericho.uucp (Gord Wait)
Subject: Re: Gravis Ultrasound Daily Digest
Organization: S-MOS Systems, Inc. (Vancouver Design Center)
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 21:38:11 GMT

In article <1992Dec21.185710.17203@rdg.dec.com> hedron::daveb writes:
>

>Gravis told me on the phone that the MIDI interface would support windows
>midid applications in "the near future". No other information was available
>from the person I talked to. Does anyone know what midi software they might
>support? I'm particularly interested in running something like Cakewalk pro and
>Cool shoes Drummer software.
>
>Other impressions of the Gravis, sounds, ease of installation/setups etc. are
>very welcome.
>

At the moment, the Gravis Ultrasound windows drivers only support midi
out. I have tried various windows demo seqencers, as well as the
multimedia player via both the ultrasound midi out (to my DX7 synth)
and to the ultrasound on board 32 voice synth, and they work fine out
the midi port, and 'sort of' work directly to the ultrasound.

Why I say sort of to support for the ultrasound on board synth is that
most of the windows sequencers do not yet support patch loading. I
understand this is a feature in the windows multimedia spec. A synth
like an MT32 has predefined patches in rom, so when you power it up,
it is ready to play. The ultrasound has no rom, so the patches you
want to use have to be loaded into the ultrasound via the driver. The
temporary workaround is to create a short midi file (using general midi
patch numbering) that calls the patches you would like to use in say,
wincake; load this midi file using the windows media player (which
DOES support patch loading), play a short bit of the song (to make the
patches actually load), then go back to running wincake. This is
(obviously) fairly awkward. 

Gravis is working on a patch loader tool as a better workaround. In
the long run, the midi sequencer companies will hopefully support
patch loading, and remove this problem. 

Another issue is that Gravis have not yet release a midi adapter for
use with the ultrasound. Apparently the Soundblaster midi adapter will
work, but needs a part change to be guaranteed to work. I beleive the
fix is to change the soundblaster adapter's 6n136 to a 6n138 opto
isolator. I built my own midi interface out of the parts from my
ex-amiga midi interface..

I am waiting for the updated windows driver that supports midi
in before I buy a windows sequencer. 

As to the quality, the synth portion sounds pretty good. Some of the
patches are lousy, some sound great. Since the synth portion uses
'sample playback' for sound generation, some of the real instruments
sound very decent. The basic piano sounds a tone better than my good
olde DX7. Gravis are supposed to release a new patch set very soon, so
I hope that it comes with some more good sounds. 

For the price, where else can you get a 32 voice polyphonic 16 bit
44khz stereo synth module, that also can play CD audio direct from
hard disk? I am waiting for the 16 bit A to D board to come out, so
the ultrasound can be used for hard disk recording. (it comes with an
8 bit stereo a-d right now..)

Its a bit early to get into full midi sequencing with the ultrasound
as you can see, but it so far seems worth the wait. 

-- 
Gord Wait 	SMOS Systems Vancouver Design Centre
uunet!jericho!gord
gord%jericho@uunet.uu.net

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