Hi Everyone, In the proccess of configuring the music studio so it has acceptable GM synthesis some way or another. Although I now have Timidity++ working very nicely as a soft synth, I'm trying to figure out if my soundcard has a synth I could use instead in order to free up some useful CPU cycles. My apologies in advance for not knowing what my f*cking hardware is in advance, I know it sounds weird. It's a PC a bought some time ago, I've never opened it yet so I wasn't sure wether the sound was implemented in the mother board or in a sound card. I now have some details about this computer and sound card, maybe from them you could tell me if it has any synth (ROM, wavetable, whatever) or not. Actually I'm almost sure there isn't, but I thought I'd ask for advice as I'm often wrong. -The computer is a HP Pavilion 420.es: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?product=73009&lang=en&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&docname=bph07258 -HP claims the motherboard is an Asus A7V-VM: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?product=73009&lang=en&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&docname=bph07227 -The Asus website does not list any motherboard with that name: http://www.asus.com/prog/p_search.asp?kp=a7v&langs=01 -In the description for the motherboard provided by HP (second link), the information regarding sound is limited to mentioning the chip Crystal CS4299, which is an AC'97 compliant circuit. This seems to address digital audio only (D/A, A/D and that), nothing to do with synth: http://www.cirrus.com/en/products/pro/detail/P25.html Some more hints / background: 1. In earlier posts I assumed my soundcard had an onboard synth. My naive assumption came only from the fact that Cakewalk produces GM sounds under Win XP. 2. In a reply (thank you Emiliano), I've been suggested that XP uses a soft synth and therefore I may not have any synth after all. 3. In a different reply (thank you Damien), I've been suggested that XP doesn't use a soft synth, but it has a soundfont named "8mbgmgs.sf2" that it loads into any wavetable soundcard it may find (Soundblaster etc). I have not checked if loading this sound font on Timidity++ or Fluidsynth produces roughly the same sounds I was getting under Windows but I'll be checking shortly. 4. ALSA creates a MIDI channel for the card, but I've discovered the computer has an external MIDI connector, so it looks like this channel routes to the connector. The description for the channel is not clear about this. I've noticed that none of the mixers I have feature a slide for synth output, it looks like no synth is connected to the hardware audio mixer in the sound card. However, another reply (thank you Marv) showed me that the slide could have a non trivial name such as "playback". When I route MIDI data to this port, MIDI vumeters at the sequencer move (indicating that MIDI data is actually being written successfully) but no sound comes out the card. Although it looks like I definitely don't have a synth, I guess there could be a possibility that I have some wavetable onboard synth but it doesn't produce anything because I didn't load any sound fonts into it prior to using it (as I've been suggested I need to do for Soundblasters in a reply, for instance, by using "sbiload" or "sfxload", thanks again Emiliano!). Thank you so much for your helpful replies so far, I'm feeling like I'm really close to getting it to work now and I'm quite excited about it, feels good. Also sorry for the extremely long email, not my initial intention really.. Cheers, Alex _________________________________________________________________ La informaci?n m?s fresca desde diferentes puntos de vista en la Revista de Prensa de MSN. http://es.newsbot.msn.com/
