On Wed, 8 Mar 2000, mark soliday wrote:
quoted 3 lines I've been under the impression that soft synth warez,> I've been under the impression that soft synth warez,
> as nice as cheap as they are don't carry the "umph"
> that hard warez offer. Am'I wrong or...
I am not sure what 'oomph' you're talking about. Hardware
synths can have lots of knobs, making the editing experience
more intuitive and hands on, and you can twiddle two or
mor knobs at once. Soft synths are limited by having to twiddle
one thing at a time with the mouse, though there are ways
around that, like using the keyboard, or a MIDI fader/knob box.
Soft synths have to contend with the latency in the sound card
drivers -- i.e. the time between when input of some sort happens,
and the effect on the output is audible. This comes from operating
system overhead and buffering requirements. Hardware synths don't
have to run Microsoft Office, so they can run a tight little loop,
polling for input and generating output with a very short lag.
Soundwise, they're different, but there isn't any problem coming
up with 'umph' in the sound, it's just going to be a little cleaner
(usually) and behave differently in the face of pathalogical tweakage.
An analogue synth will soldier on and keep producing vaguely musical
noises long after the softsynth has started sounding like your computer
is being fed into a threshing machine.
So there are places for both. With a few notable exceptions, the latency
issue keeps a synth from being seriously playable, at least to people
used to not waiting to hear a key after they've struck it.
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