WHY DOESN"T THIS DAMN THING PLAY MY MUSIC ???? A few tips about PC's, noise and Music, by way of introduction for the complete newbie, and financially challenged aspiring PC musician: PART 2 Now, lets control all these with SOFTWARE in WIN95. . . MIDI signals can go in and out. sound can come out. Sound can also go in. You can hook a cheap microphone to the MIC in, or a stereo signal to the LINE in plugs. Those are the other 2 little plugs in back of your sound card. Of course you have to set the computer up so it knows a signal is comming in, AND you need a program that can handle the recording. Imagine a mixing board with NO knobs... Where are the knobs?? Maybe your sound card came with a program like MEDIA RACK, or AUDIO RACK.. These look cool, but Win95 has a cheap version too! See that speaker on the bottom right of your screen? Click twice. TWICE! See the Wave, SYNTH, mic and line in sliders? NO? click up on options, then Properties and enable them. Notice the PLAYBACK and RECORDING choices. Remember these! Your sound card wil NOT handle patching these automatically. You have to check and set these by yourself. You will have to set these differently for a number of different tasks. Also, sometimes the NIFTY looking WHATEVER-RACK software will over-ride these, and you will forget about it, and your WHATEVER- RACK software will have the balance slid over all the way to the right, and you will forget about it when you get sick of using the WHATEVER-RACK software, and you will think your sound card or speaker set is defective. Don't laugh! It happens! But there is more. Buried in the CONTROL PANEL, MULTIMEDIA section are the default settings for all the various parts of your soundcard's drivers. You can ALSO get to ONE PAGE of this by WRONG-clicking (the right mouse button is the wrong button, because the left button is the right button - clear yes no ?) on the little speaker thing and choosing ADJUST AUDIO PROPERTIES. Better to get there from CONTROL PANEL. All your music and sound software will look at the settings here to determine where to get and send signals. You could be sending your music to the voice modem part of your modem, and your midi signals to the midi cable out (called the MPU-401) section. Why Windows does not put these somewhere more convient is a question that some software designer or microsoft programmer will get rich answering. So there are 2 full sets of controls for your mixer, 3 with the audio-whatever rack software. ALSO: any software that will play & record will also have a mix section too! If you cant keep all this straight, you will be wonnerin' "where is my sound???" As a further Bonus, you get to remember that in general, ONLY ONE THING CAN USE ONE CHANNEL AT A TIME! So you can't play 2 sample based drum machines, or 2 midi players or two CDROM readers playing audio CD's at ONCE . . . UNLESS. . . You have 2 soundcards (advanced topic) OR You have special newer, better designed software, OR You use some interesting software patches. For now, the only way to keep this straight is to practice using them. PRACTICE: Win95 has a really cheesy .wav player & recorder called SNDREC32. Type this at the RUN line (START, RUN, ). Now hook a microphone to your sound card (look for the MIC plug in back) and mess around until you can record your voice and play it back. You will have to go to the RECORDING section of your mixing panel (and/or mudia_rack software) to set up the microphone as the INPUT source. Double click on the speaker on the bottom right hand of your screen. This brings up the VOLUME CONTROL. Click on OPTIONS at the top right hand of this box. Now click on PROPERTIES. Now click on RECORDING. Make sure the box for MIC is checked off. Notice the other things you can try to get to work as INPUTS. now click OK. New BOX! Note that you can only choose ONE of the sliders at a time. choose MIC. Now switch back to SNDREC32 and hit the record button. Say something profound. Hit stop, then PLAY. Does your voice sound great or what? Try all the options, it is a good intro lesson. You should at least be able to record your own voice to a .wav file and play it back. SNDREC32 comes with a few cheesy effects. Try them too. Too bad the length it can record is limited. DRIVER YOU CRAZY: WIN 3.1 and DOS users can do most of this, but it is FAR more cumbersome. When you installed your soundcard in Windows 95, it set itself up (we hope) with all the little extras that allow some level of cumbersome but functional integration. Thats what the driver software, and the PLEASE INSERT YOUR WINDOWS 95 CD was all about. Win 3.1 used the DOS sound drivers. This means that if you don't have your DOS drivers hooked up, you get no sound in WIN 3.1 To further annoy you, most sound applications in Win3.1 and DOS assume that your soundcard is trying to FAKE a soundblaster 16 and /or an ADLIB card. (Adlib was the first functional class of PC soundcard, Soundblaster 16, the second generation. A soundblaster or fake one also fakes an adlib card.) Sometimes the DOS/WIN 3.1 driver software package that comes with your card sets this up prefectly. Other times it messes up REALLY REALLY badly. Fixing it requires a good understanding of IRQ's, DMA, config.sys lines, autoexec.bat lines BLASTER= lines in the autoexec,bat, and a few other bits of voodoo. A driver web site like www.windrivers.com has lots of tips for you on these fine points, and maybe can direct you to the updated, or missing driver install package you need to get your card going. You better have your card in your hand, to read the chip manufacturer name and number. Look for the biggest sqare flat chip in the middle of the card, that has a LOGO on it. eg: OPTI, CRYSTAL, AD (analog devices), etc. If REALLY LOST, search www.deja.com for any previous info on the soundcard brand, chipset, etc. SAMPLE RATES and other confusions... Lets say that you do the SNDREC32 exercise mentioned earlier. You will notice, if you dig around in the CONTROL PANEL, MULTIMEDIA, AUDIO, RECORDING section something about CD quality, FM radio quality and TELEPHONE quality (or something similar). If you dig around in the PROPERTIES section of SNDREC32, you will find that you can convert your recorded clip's sample rate, resolution and set up whether you want stereo or mono sound. There are also a few other things involving the METHOD used by Windows to encode all this, but we'll ignore them for now. Just say PCM, and move on. OK.. Imagine a sound clip at CD quality: It is recorded at 44,100 KHZ (44,100 thousand squiggles a second), 16 bits wide, and at a certain fast resolution which we will ignore. It is stereo. It is 1 minute long. It takes up a certain amount of space on your hard drive. If we convert it to mono, it will take up half as much space. Cut the quality to a sample 8bits wide, and we half it again. Drop the sample rate to 22,050 khz and you half it again. This means that your slow computer can keep up with the demands of reading the file fast enough to play it in REAL time, and that your small hard drive can store more minutes of your brilliant sound samples. OF COURSE YOU LOSE QUALITY (who needs quality?) Lets try this again: A data CD holds up to 680 megs of data. If we could play one as an audio cd, at audio CD speed, it would squeal horrible noise for about 74 minutes max. If you "ripped" a 74 minute audio CD, you would get about 680 megs of sound data at 44,100khz, stereo, 16bits. I think you get the idea. Convert this huge sample to 22,050khz and you half the space this mess takes up. . . more or less... Less quality, takes less SPACE equals more ROOM!... All of them sound like SOMETHING coming out of a speaker, All must be converted to the CD standard 44,100 KHZ 16-bit Stereo if you want to run a CD burner to burn your creation to an original audio CD (no it will not be a production master, but it will be close). Only CD quality .wav files can be burnt to CD, even if they were coverted from really cruddy low sample rate mono wav files. Really new CD burning programs do this on the fly, without you having to worry about it, but plenty of new fish have tried feeding MP3's and odd sample rate audio files to their CDR programs, only to end up with a shiny new coaster for their beer glass. ALSO: You cannot stuff 2 hours of lower sample rate audio onto an audio CD. Everything gets converted to the 44,100 khz 16-bit stereo standard, of which a maximum of 74 minutes fits on a regular blank CD. Modern CDR software will take care of this for you. But it might make a mess of the conversion too... There is also COMPRESSION: (those MP3 things) MP3 files are a new way of recording sound. They have compression tricks built in, and.... unlike .zip files, . . . . .THEY THROW PARTS AWAY !!! Yup... think of an MP3 as a record of what CHANGES in a sound, rather than the whole sound. OK, so i simplify, but they take up less space: sometimes %5 of a CD quality file, and can be expanded (more or less) back to a .wav file. YES: you lose some quality. Mainstream music programs are JUST beginning to use MP3s.. For one thing, you need a more POWERFULL processor to do a lot with them in real time. They have all kinds of fudgeable parameters too, to make them smaller, mono, less quality, etc. . . Just like .wav files. When your PC plays an MP3, it is converted back to a .wav file in (hopefully ...crackkkk! static... pop! ) real time. You could put 6-9 hours of MP3 data files on a DATA cd, but then you would have to listen to it on your computer, with an MP3 player program. Or you could load them into your RIO player, or something like it. These are very popular with music pirates in Russia. I have a newsphoto picture of the Russian authorities running a steamroller over a pile of "bootleg' CDs: In the foreground, the title of one is clearly visible: KISS MP3s ! WOW! 9hrs of KISS blaring out of your itty bitty speakers on top of your monitor. Of course you could run a wire to your stereo amp.. What your MP3 player is doing is converting these to the kind of signals that your .wav file player creates at your soundcard, and playing them through the usual .wav output. Most MP3 players also allow you to output your mp3 music to a .wav file on your hard drive (which gets big fast) This lets you swipe an mp3 off the internet, render it to .wav, then cut away the parts you don't want until you have that wicked drum solo which you wanted to loop into your mix. Run a search for AUDIOGRABBER: The alternatives mentioned might even lead you to a free replacement for it. There are plenty of MP3 encoders around to turn your .wav files into MP3 files. Converting usually takes a bit of time. You need a pretty good processor to handle CD quality .wav files, and a pretty modern (though not expensive) sound card to keep up with them too.. But not too much. You need a Pentium 200 to do DJ mixes with 2 MP3 files. You can edit .wav files with half as much pentium. Still sluggish? Time to mix at FM quailty, or mono, or .... OFF-TOPIC: What is REALLY annoying is that most of these MP3 dj proggies want a PC with a monitor set to 800 x 600. This has NOTHING to do with sound, but goes to raise the price of any low-budget mp3 mixing set-up... DAMN! It aint just your soundcard and cpu setup that will extort time and $$$ from you... It would be REAL NICE if I could slap together an MP3 dj setup without the extra US$40 expense of tracking down an 800 x 600 capable monitor, and SVGA card, and.... (OH CRAP!) MIDI CONCERNS MIDI music takes the absolute LEAST space. Midi files are small, and require very little processing effort from your computer. If you are using your pc with the $40 cable, and a nice keyboard for the sound (in effect, using your pc as the paper roll on a player piano), you could even use an old DOS machine, or a WIN 3.1 machine (OOOOOOH UGLY!) OH! in case you haven't figured it out yet, MIDI music is ALL instrumental. The default MEDIA PLAYER in W95 will try to play midi, as will newer versions of WINAMP (one of the favourite MP3 players around), as well as a whole bunch of other free or expensive midi players. Most AUDIO-RACK or similar software bundled with soundcards includes a midi player that can be set up with a set list to play. These players will just pass the midi information to your default MIDI-out soundcard chip setup or soundcard driver Wavesynth setup. (a tricky set of drivers that comes with your soundcard, and gets a little better sound out of the 4 beepy things built onto your card.) Note that if you have the expensive PC midi cable, you can route your midi tune being played, out via the cable (the MPU-401 choice - thats the official name for it), to your MIDi keyboard (or drumbox) and have the tune you are playing coming out of the keyboard OR drumbox. There are also a few MIDI loopback programs out there, to let you try and chain a whole bunch of midi things together inside your PC, because midi folks got used to cabling all their keyboards and drumboxes together in the "real" world and missed the fun. When you feel confident, and have some time, run a search for: HUBI's MIDI LOOPBACK and read ALL the info that comes with it. There are also alternative WAVESYNTH programs that bypass the beepy devices on your soundcard, and whatever software "banks" your soundcard drivers load up, and try to give you a richer, better or somehow diferent midi sound. Most of these will also allow you to do a slower-than-real-time RENDERING to a .wav file : you can specify that your midi piece with Helicopters and Taiko Drums should have up to 128 Helicopters and Taiko drums buzzing around, as needed. Finally: The real neat thing about MIDI is that you can open up a .mid file in a midi editor or SEQUENCER, and after converting it around a bit, see all the instrument tracks. Then you can switch instruments so that the Beer Barrel Polka is done with Overdrive guitars, taiko drums and Helicopter. This sounds really bad, but can be lots of fun. Of course you soon find out that OVERDRIVE GUITAR, for your soundcard setup means LOUD TIN CAN BUZZING THING, but hey.... Converting midi file to .wav files can be done by software, by a variation on those software synths mentioned earlier. Converting .wav files to MIDI is a bit of a mess, because you need a lot of computer to sort out the notes and instruments. More than a few programs to do this are out there, but their accuracy sucks big time! However: this is a good way to fake up an "original" composition. Midi files can also be converted to rough approximations of Guitar Tab scores and even bar-and-staff sheet music (after a lot of fixing up). A real jerk could put a RAMONES audio cd in his PC, rip it to .wav, run it through a midi to wav converter a few times at different settings, load the midi tracks into a midi editor, assign instruments, clean up the timing, and then print the whole mess out as sheet music. "Oh look! My new 12-tone experimental string quartet!" This could explain certain modern composers. Come to think of it, there is this one New York Puppy, whose work sounds like the auto-accompany part of the old ATARI 1040 Cubase V2, with a few keys on a midi keyboard taped down. (Found this out when testing the old Atari as a "sideman" for the PC, at a bar on an off-night). No names please, but he got rich as fuck for this trick.... Other ODD media formats (and rant on piracy): With all the .waves, midi and MP3 files out there, you can guess that music companies and others are beginning to have kittens about CD sales and copyright, and plagiarism, and all that kind of stuff. So they have been hard at work developing NEW audio (and video) formats that can be played off the web, but supposedly CANNOT be recorded onto your drive, copied, mucked with, resampled and burnt to bootlegs on a CDR. . . HA! Protection usually last s about 3 weeks, before someone figures a way around it. A www.deja.co => newsgroups search on "how do I capture xyz ?" will undoubtedly yield you an up-to-date answer on these matters. If it plays out your PC speakers, it can be grabbed. Simple as that. At some point in time, the big media giants will figure out that most of this copying is either done by folks with time on their hands and access to expensive equipment and fast internet lines, but little free cash., (in other words: non-customers) or folks who are so angry at rip-off prices that they do this stuff as a form of revenge. Swiping a CD's worth of MP3's, cleaning them up and burning them, still costs more in time and materials then most CD-of-the-month club releases- assuming that you work 40+ hours (oh exaustion!) a week, and make more than $10/ hr. Anyway: The Greatfull Dead gave up on records for the last 10+ years of their career, and manged to pass on/ break up quite well off. The big media companies would copyright farts and charge a nickle a toot if they could: it's nice to see technology giving them all ulcers. Very little of these riches ever made it to the musicians; look at all the famous bluesmen who were screwed out of their royalties by crooked studio pigs! For every musician that worries about his or her royalties, there are 20 or 100 more who now can mix and make their own demo cd's at home. MORE RANT: The real danger of home PC music studios and CDR copying is how it eats away at the low-end /impulse sector of the music industry. It raises the bar! You will still buy the CD you LOVE, but this week's fluff on high rotation top-40 air play now must pass a simple test: Is this worth buying, or do I just let it sleep on the couch a few nights. . . 3 days later, "Gawd I'm sick of that!" PHHHT! goes that .MP3! OR worse: Shit! I can do better than THAT! We sheep look up and are not fed. . . PRACTICE! PRACTICE! PRACTICE! So what does all this mean? Lets try another exercise: One way to live DJ mix on the Cheap is to run MIDI sounds and .wav or MP3 sounds at the same time. Your soundcard should be able to do both, and have room for a music CD playing in the CDROM. WOW! You can do weddings! Win95 has a few .mid files as default: FIND them (they end in .mid) and click on them- the windows media player will play them. At the same time, open SNDREC32 and play your voice sample over & over & over (as long as you keep clicking PLAY)... All this assumes that you like to hear your own voice repeating "TEST, TEST!" to the tune: "Hall of the mountain king". Now plop an audio CD into the CDROM reader, get it running, and turn the MIDI player and the SNDREC32 back on. For an advanced exercise for WIN95 users, install Microsoft's latest Media player and DIRECT X (DX7). DX7 is a thing MS invented to speed up sound and video in windows. This will allow you to play multiple samples at once, and it is FREE! You can even set it in properties to loop! Just make sure that the CONTROL PANEL|MULTIMEDIA|MIDI setup is set to your wavesynth or OPL driver (and not some tricky extra wavesynth program that will hog your WAVE channel. Both DX7 and the MEDIA PLAYER can be dug up at the main Microsoft site. See.. you didnt need any expensive stuff! This is that Amsterdam Minimal stuff! 3 hours of your voice repeating the word "BANANNA", while you play the intro on all the tracks of your Zeppelin CD, and run a midi drum loop! You can cash in big as a DJ. At least 2 free beers for mixing all night! ANOTHER EXERCISE: The upgrade version of MS Media PLayer will play multiple .wav samples at the same time, but it will only play ONE midi file at a time. Lets CAPTURE a midi file to .wav format, so it can be used as a loop. Open a midi file in a midi player, and for best results, use one other than the UPGRADED MS MEDIA PLYER (which sometimes fouls this trick up) Your MEDIA-OR-whatever-rack player works, as do a number of others, as long as they are playing your soundcard's OPL-midi section, or your soundcard' driver wavesynth (which is the default setup) And since we all do not have expensive sound editors like Soundforge, open, by typing at the start/run SNDREC32 (eyuccckk! not again!) Or use some other free/inexpensive audio editor with a RECORD function. Your "RACK" software probably came with one. Now go to CONTROL PANEL | MULTIMEDIA |WAVE (or wrong-click on that SPEAKER, and choose ADJUST AUDIO PROPERTIES). Make sure that the RECORD section is set to your soundcard - this might be something cryptic like CM388-driver, but it will be the only choice besides software you installed, your voice modem, and possibly something called GAME COMPATIBLE device - which we will ignore at this point. It is probably the same thing as the PLAYBACK section is set to, IF your machine is set to W9X defaults. It is probably set up right already. Below this is another window: PREFERED QUALITY. Chose radio quality for now. Recall the previous stuff on sample rates. Here is where you set the defaults for recording. You can customize these later. NEXT: 2 clicks on the speaker on the bottom right of your screen... That's the mixer VOLUME CONTROL thang... Top right, FILE, PROPERTIES, hit the button for RECORDING, make sure the MIXER box below is one of the selected , click OK... BOOM... up comes up the OTHER damn mixer that MS gave us, but didn't make obvious... (another 2x click on the speaker brings up the standard VOLUME CONTROL one again, you will need both... These VARY by soundcard driver, but usually, the RECORDING panel lets you choose ONE recording source... click MIXER's box below the slider... NOW open your recorder: IT should home in on the windows default source set in control panel (as YOUR SOUNDCARD recording, detailed previously) If not, check in your editor for a properties section and make it so.. Hit RECORD, hopefully you'll get a control box, set monitor on if you have it. ---- on sndrec32, note nice oscilliscope effect ---ackkk! Your editor should have SOME kind of level meter showing signs of input. USE the recoding and volume controls to get a level while playing the midi file. Now do it again with the settings right. Stop the MIDI player. Most editors have a PLAY button to play back what you just recorded. Sounds OK? save the captured file, and away you go. WAIT! There is a chance you will get NOTHING! Don't panic! close down all of the programs politely, re-boot and try again. Sometimes Win9x's sound system hangs for no good reason whatsoever. Most likely, unless you lock up and crash, all the sttings you already mad will be still set up. Try it again slowly. Try to avoid using the UPGRADED version of Windows MEDIA PLAYER before /or for doing this. . . Maybe it is just me, But I smell a copy-protection scheme in the way that it messes up the internal recording feature of W9x. This trick is also good for getting a loop from one of the many Text 2 speech programs out there - most do not have a save to .wav function. If you dont have the CPU, or your drives are not set to DMA (WIN95A CONTROL PANEL| SYSTEM |DEVICE MANGER | DISK DRIVES | -yours- | SETTINGS | DMA ) or you have other things slowing your PC down, you will get choppy samples until you reduce the record sample rate down to wahtever it takes (GAHHH: mono 11khz, 8bit ???) So what! All the sample loops are now YOURS! World Domination within your grasp! FINAL NOTES: A variety of PLAYERS exist for the different sound file FORMATS (.wav midi , MP3) that one can play on a PC. There are also MANY EDITORS, SEQUENCERS, CONVERTERS, and sundry other utilities that will allow you to manipulate sounds and music on your PC. Many entry level ones are inexpensive or free, and can be found on the net. A search for SHAREWARE MUSIC PROGRAMS will turn up a number of sites. I am currently a fan of www.sonicspot.com in Australia. (who knows how it will be by the time you read this.) A number of USENET newsgroups also cary lively discusions and information about music software and hardware. www.deja.com => newsgroup search is a good place to start. Your BROWSER (netscape, IE, outlook express ) can read these, but a dedicated reader is hepful if you find yourself following a group regularly. For the first week: read all, add nothing, and find the FAQ (the handbook) for that newgroupand read it 3 times. Ok... make some tunes, and don't start lusting after $800 commercial programs until you can comfortably use them. Remember that some of the best things in life are free, or at least available through effort, rather than cash. END 2 of 2 (c) 2000 King Beat Rythm Box collective.