I thought I would report to the LAU on some testing of Specimen. First, though I publicly thank Pete Bessman for his great work. As some of you may recall, I'm working on 3-D audio, but also on 1- and 2-D instrument generation using physical modelling. (My background is physics and EE, not music nor recording. My apologies!) Anyway, I had created a series of 84 WAV files, each 24-bit, 96,000 samples/sec, three seconds in length (!), mono. Each of these is nearly 1 MB in size. In order to really test soundfonts, I need something that will play MIDI files or something such as that, so I can determine what the soundfont sounds like in a real piece, not just with my hacking on a keyboard. Using an BEEF XML file that I created, I was able to scoop up 64 notes into Specimen, which appears to have converted the WAV files to stereo. So it had loaded about 100 MB of samples, one for each note from C2 to daylight, as some would say. I then played, with pmidi, a rather fast MIDI file: LISZT.MID, a short piano piece by Franz Liszt. You may have heard this in Western movies, played on a honky-tonk piano, in a saloon scene. It's 175 BPM, so it's fast, esp. for three-second WAV samples and with a lot of chords! It played this piece just fine as far as I can hear. (1) For comparison, I tried my toylike Magix MIDI Studio WAVE player sampler synth. I was only able to load about 48 notes. The results were catastrophic. I estimate that about 2/3 of the notes were dropped. There were a lot of popping and crackling sounds as the piece was being slaughtered. (This sampler is DircectX.) So it was no contest. I don't own any pro-level Windows sampler synths, except for Gigasampler lite --- but alas, this version doesn't work with XP; it's 16/44.1 K, not 24/96, and I don't have a way of getting WAV's to Gigasampler format. So again, it's no contest. As far as I'm concerned, Gigasampler lite was a no-show. I'd be happy to run other test of other software, but need some pointers to demos, etc. It should also be relatively straightforward to use such software, like Specimen is. Alternatively, I challenge others to load up 64 three-second 24/96 samples in their favorite synth, play a 175 BPM file with lots of chords, and report back to the rest of us. I'll email the file to those interested. I'm serious; I'd really like to know what's out there. How much does it cost, and how easy is it to use? If it's less than five dollars and very easy to use, I may be interested. Thanks again, Pete. Wonderful work. For me it's very useful, even without all the advanced features. --------------- (1) P4, 2.6 GHz, 800 MHz FSB (dual-channel 400 MHz DDR's). 2.6.1 kernel. 1 GB memory, ECC. The soundfont I created was not a piano soundfont, so musically it sounds kind of silly. It sounds just fine technically.
