I found two *.SF2 files in the c:\windows\system32 folder. Those are: CT4MGM.SF2 (which is the one that's already installed) CT2MGM.SF2 (which isn't installed)
I don't have a "sythA". The only option in the "soundfont device" box is "creative sound font synth" so I perforce selected that. There are no options at all for the "select midi in" box, so I had to leave that blank. I was able to choose "CC0(GS) in the "Bank index display mode" box.
I downloaded and unzipped the chaos zip, and put the two files in it into the windows/system32 folder where the MTM.sf2 files are. There two CHAOS files are Chaos8M.sf2 and chaos8m.txt.
The chaos didn't a ppear in the "soundfont device" box after I did that, so I closed out the bank manager and restarted it. No luck, I had the same thing as before, which are the CT4... in slots 0-9, 16, and 127, and no mention of any other slots. I checked the chaos8m.txt file but it has just a list of instruments and their "patch" number, useful for some things, but not for this. The "soundfont device" box only has the one option for "creative sound font synth, the same as before I loaded the CHAOS files into the system32 folder.
In the System32 folder, there are three short files:
DEFAULT.SFM which contains RSFM3 SFMSLIST' INFOinit À CT2MGM.SF2 DEFAULT4.SFM which contains RSFM3 SFMSLIST' INFOinit À CT4MGM.SF2 DEFAULT8.SFM which contains RSFM3 SFMSLIST' INFOinit À CT8MGM.SF2
Since Default 4 contains the only stuff I see in my bank manager, I made a copy of it and changed the text "CT4MGM.SF2" text in the original to "CHAOS8M.SF2", but that didn't make any difference. I still had only "CT4MGM.SF2" available when I restarted the bank manager.
I'll reboot the computer now, and see if that helps.
OK, rebooted, which didn't help, except that now the sound bank that's in charge is identified as CT2MGM.SF2 and all the options are that one too. Noteworthy sounds about the same despite the bank change. Tomorrow I'll change all three of those *.SFM files to "CHAOS8M.SF2" and reboot, but I've had it for tonight. I went to a local bar earlier and shot pool, and had one vodka. (I can't handle my liquor: if I have two drinks, I'm drunk). I played pool for a while and was a lot more successful than I've been with the sound manager so far, eventually giving the table to the last guy I beat because I wanted to go home. But it's 1:00AM my time now, and time for bed. Oh, NEWS FLASH! I noticed the "load" button underneath the "Bank Stack" box, and clicked on it, and thereby was able to load the CHAOS *.SFM file as a second entry in the box, in addition to the "CT4MGM.SF2". All the numbered options on the left were changed to "CHAOS" thereby, but I'll bet I can change that by dragging "CTM2..." into some of them. But it's time for bed now. I just renamed the CHAOS trial default file to DEFAULTCHAOS.SFM and restored the copy of the CT4...SFM file to its original name. Maybe I'm getting somewhere! but now it's time for bed.
You must be a saint to put up with this. I'm a complete moron about this stuff. I'm much better at pool, though probably not as good as Mozart because it was said that nobody could beat him. Thank you so much for your help. Things are still as mysterious to me as ever, but at least I can get around a little now. We'll see how things go tomorrow.
It's "tomorrow" now. Things look good. The synthetic strings I use on my "In Romantic Style" sound about the same with the CHAOS sounds, but Tina's opening movement of the Beethoven fourth which I had looked at before to try to see how Beethoven handled the orchestra in it, which was unlistenable before, is now, though distinctly electronic, is quite listenable. But now I'm confused again. I thought it was unlistenable before, so I just changed from the CHAOS to CT4... and it sounds the same. Now I don't know if I've just become more tolerant than before, or if it really was as bad as I remembered before. I'll have to reboot with the "CT4..." in place, and see if there's any difference.
There's a mysterious message on the Soundbank Font Manager: "You can configure your midi banks here. Multiple Sound Font files can be applied to a single MIDI bank. Banks are selected by using MIDI controller 0". I have no idea what "MIDI controller 0" is, or how one would assign two sound banks to any of the "select bank" items numbered 0 to 127. I don't see how to "drag": using the usual method of dragging doesn't work. The only way I could get "CT4..." back into those numbered slots was to "Remove" the Chaos from the "Bank Stack", and then they all flipped to MTM4. I can't load the "CHAOS" back after deleting it, unless I "remove" the MTM4 first, because the message says I have not enough memory. I recall that it origially said I had 9.8 something available of which I was using 2.2 of the same something before. I just tried to have the CHAOS and the CT4... in "Bank Stack" at the same time, but though I had both of them visible before, I don't now seem to be able to have more than one and have to remove it before I choose another *.SF2 file.
Anyhow, I have the CT4... bank stack item visible now, and I'll reboot and see how the Beethoven sounds with that in all the "select bank" slots after rebooting. I'm not able to drag anything from "bank stack" into "select bank", but if I start by going to "select bank" and pick an empty number, the entry in "bank stack" disappears.
Well I just rebooted, and it seems that no matter what "bank stack" item is in the "select bank" slots, Chaos or a CT... item, everything sounds exactly the same. Maybe the Beethoven always sounded like that and I've just become more tolerant of the electronic sounds. I did discover that I can get the CT2 stack item, but not the CT4 item, into the "bank stack" box at the same time, but it doesn't make any difference because all the items in the "select bank" box will be the stack box item I most recently loaded, there doesn't seem to be any way that I've discovered to change that, and it doesn't make any difference to the actual sound what stack item I choose anyway. This is weird stuff, man. I can't believe my soundblaster card came without any instructions about it at all, not even so much as mentioning the existence of the "soundfont bank manager" application.
I made breakfast and coffee while the computer was rebooting, so I'll eat it now, and then look at the remainder of your WORD document.
OK, I looked a bit further down, and saw that I next have to go to "Sounds and audio devices" in the Control Panel. I did that, but I don't see anything like "SB X-FI Synth A [D000]" in it. The only two options I have are: Creative Sound Font Synth Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth It was set to the first one of those. I could set it to the second, but I didn't do that, since it doesn't look like it has anything to do with the CHAOS wavetable.
I think I'm done for today. This stuff hurts my head. Maybe I'll try the Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth later and see if that makes any difference.
Do you have any idea why I might not be seeing anything like the "SB X FI Synth A" in my control panel sound settings?
Thanks awfully for your help. This stuff seems so weird to me.
I am planning to get no less than 8G of RAM with my next computer, which will have to be WINDOWS 7 I suppose, and I suppose I'll have to get new hardware. The only peripheral hardware I have, other than the IBOOK which I already know will work with Windows 7 is the sound card though. I am ready for a new sound card since I'm really tired of my experience trying unsuccessfully to get good sound with the one I have, though that may not be so much the fault of the card as it is of the bizarre (to me) nature of dealing with sound fonts, which I'm not at all sure will be any clearer (to me) with the next generation of sound cards as it is with the current one.
Actually, I do have other peripherals - a laser printer and a scanner. It never occurred to me they might not work with Windows 7 and with a 64-bit system. I know my MyBook works, but I never tried hooking the printer and scanner up. There's no way around it though, Microsoft is going to force me to give up XP, since I've finally gotten uncomfortable with it, which is a completely unacceptable state of affairs in Microsoft's eyes. I just checked Microsoft's compatibility, and my printer is compatible with Windows 7. My scanner is old and isn't listed, but later versions of the same scanner are OK.
As I casually mentioned elsewhere, I'd really like to get an extra disk and put the operating system on that too, though just use it as a secondary disk for the most part. But then I'd always have a disk available with a relatively pristine registry on it, if I wanted to boot from that one. I don't know if Microsoft has put up roadblocks that will keep me from doing that though.
Thanks for your WORD document. The picture in it of the sound bank manager looks almost exactly like mine and has the same essential parts in the same order. I was going through it and keeping an exhaustive running commentary, but about a half hour, I would guess, into it, but I somehow managed to close firefox and lose everything I'd typed, while I was looking for something analogous to a "Chaos 8m Soundfont in your folder", which incident has fired up my techno-fatigue again, after it taking me pretty much a week to get over the previous bout of techno-fatigue. Up to that point, everything had gone swimmingly, but I hit a brick wall when you wrote "Browse to the Chaos8M Soundfont in your folder And OPEN", since I don't know what that is and I don't see anything like it. I have no idea where there would be such a folder. I don't seem to have anything like it. I lost Firefox when I clicked on something called "SFBM.EXE.MANIFEST" which certainly didn't look promising but it was almost the only thing in the "Creative" folder that contains "Soundblaster" as one of its subfolders that wasn't recognizably something familiar that probably wasn't a soundfont, such as DLLs and INIs and the exectutable file SFBM.EXE that's the "Sound Font Bank Manager" executable that we're running itself. The only other file I would have checked out was called "sfbm_skn.rtx", which looks like a "skin" file. I think I know what "skin" files are and that they're just annoying fluff that I want nothing to do with, but I would have checked it out anyway if I hadn't blown everything by trying to see if there was any hope for "SFBM.EXE.MANIFEST".
I don't appear to have a "sound bank" such as you were aiming at when you wrote "Browse to the Chaos8M Soundfont in your folder And OPEN". If I did, perhaps it would have been come already installed on my soundblaster card anyway. I'm maybe going to have to get a new soundcard with a new 64-bit computer anyway. I sure wish Microsoft would stop throwing everything to the winds every few years and forcing technophobes like me into a whole new round of very unpleasant and ungratifying operating system shenanigans.
I take it the sound card that you have did actually come with the soundfont that you're discussing installed. I've been looking at the ASUS sound card, which seems to have some connection with CHAOS, and I wonder if that one comes with a sound bank that can be installed as per your instructions, or far better gets automatically installed when you install the soundcard so that one doesn't have to go through all this bizarre stuff? I know myself, and I'd rather compute taxes for everybody on my block than have to hunt up sound fonts on the web and then try to figure out what to do with them.
Unfortunately, I can't tell from the descriptions of any of these sound cards whether they will do what I want, which is just to produce sounds that are vaguely like the instruments they're named after. It doesn't have to be exact, but a "cello" shouldn't sound more like a flute than a cello IMV, as it does on my current system. And a "string orchestra", as opposed to the synthetic strings which are the only things other than piano that sound OK on my system, shouldn't sound more like a bunch of juvenile delinquents pulling cats' tails than a real string orchestra.
Anyhow, I'm definitely techno-fatigued-out, but thanks very much for your post, and particularly for your WORD file which got me much further than I've ever gotten before, and which I've saved in the hope that when I get a new system, I'll be able to use it. And please do tell me, if you can, though this subject seems so arcane that I'm not sure that anybody can predict what anybody else's experience will be, what your sound card is if you can carry the instructions you provided to completion, or even better if a decent soundfont gets loaded as part of the installation of the card. I don't check my email very often, so this forum might be better to post in. It probably will be a few days before I recover from my current techno-fatigue, though.
I took my "new" computer back, with regrets, since I really liked the small size. The fact that it didn't come with a monitor, so that I was using an old fourteen-inch-diagonal monitor with it, might have been a factor why after a while I wasn't even turning it on, but trying to figure stuff out with the added complication of a new operating system was the major factor I suppose. It's probably a very nice computer for somebody who doesn't need any slots to add anything to it, but my experience with "MyBook" leads me to believe that a USB connection might not be adequate for a soundcard. "MyBook" admittedly did work a little better with Windows 7 in the new computer than with Windows XP in the old one, though. I don't have a new computer yet, I'm suffering from techno-exhaustion at the moment. The new computer that I took back had 6G of Ram, which perhaps could be increased. I think I want no less than 8G, though I don't know how much that will really help, or if the Windows 7 operating system will just eat it up for its own secret priestly purposes. I don't know how I'm ever going to keep a clean registry. I'd like to have two drives with Windows 7 on both of them, and keep one almost pristine so that I can always run stuff on it. Microsoft might make it very awkward to do that though, for its own licensing motives, much as after I updated Windows XP on my current computer a couple of times, the reinstallation disk wouldn't work anymore - wouldn't even recognize that I had a hard disk at all on my system.
My computer completely recovered from the virus, it seems, but the path to that was odd and, as usual with me, incomprehensible. I went to Black Viper's (majorgeeks.com) "services" recommendations, using "services.msc" as viper recommends, instead of "msconfig", and set my values to viper's recommendations. When I rebooted, my computer was far slower, appallingly slow, so I restored my computer to the state it had been in that morning before I used "services.msc" (which one can do with XP though I don't know if Windows 7 has anything similar). After I did that and rebooted, suddenly all the apparently residual problems from the virus were gone. That's even though I'd repeatedly used that "restore" function since I'd gotten the virus, and each of those "restores" should in theory have done the same thing that the "restore" operation after I had twiddled with the "services" recommendations did.
Hi, I already have Glary Utilities. I haven't run the optimizer, but I will when I get back. (I want to get outside for a while first, since it's already 1:30PM and it's a beautiful day in beautiful San Francisco.) My first name is "Geoff" by the way (actually "Geoffrey" but I never use the last three letters). I guess I'm signed up here as "Arrowsmith", since everybody has been using that.
As noted to Barry, I'm sorry I didn't identify my sound card, I thought I had. I may still not have identified my current OS, which is Windows XP though I'll be getting a new computer which will bring me, kicking and screaming, up to Windows 7.
Even with the missing information supplied, I can sympathize with how frustrating I must be. I just don't "get" this stuff, and I'm really reluctant to spend a lot of time just trying to get good sound - I want to concentrate on the notes, not on the sound. I almost don't care about the sound, as long as it's listenable, but unfortunately the default midi sounds are for the most part not listenable, if you put them all together as in a symphony orchestra.
That very small sample does sound nice. I'd like to get that kind of sound. One thing very odd about what I find when looking for stuff about sound, is that there seems to be enormous interest in creating various kinds of "libraries". I can't imagine why anybody would bother so much about that, but the most annoying thing about it is that it takes a while before I realize (and can really believe) that that's all they're talking about.
My CD's are organized into bookcases of Romantic, 20th Century, Classical, Baroque (except Bach), Bach&Jazz&non-European, and Renaisssance&Pop& Miscellaneous. What's so hard about that?
I'm sorry I didn't say what soundcard I had, I thought I did. It's "SoundBlaster Live 24-bit, version 7.1". It's not an expensive card, I bought it after Garritan (apparently) blew out my sound card while I was going through the enormous and ultimately fruitless horror of trying to understand what this stuff was all about. It was so frustrating my mind may have closed off understanding now in self-defense - I know I feel extreme aversion now.
I didn't even know my soundblaster had "soundfont bank" capability until today, because there's no mention of it at all in the tiny manual. I discovered it by accident when I was "removing" Microsoft Security Essentials, and noticed something called "Soundfont Bank Manager" in the add/remove programs list. I investigated, and insofar as I can understand anything, the card has the capablity of importing soundcard banks though I haven't seen any way of actually doing that even from SoundBlaster's side, much less getting Noteworthy to recognize them. There don't appear to be any actual soundbanks included, which seems odd to me. You're supposed to get them from elsewhere. I mentioned earlier that I did find the Yamaha set on the web and ran the only executable program in the ZIP file, but that didn't seem to do anything. There are no instructions at all about how to actually get a sound bank into SoundBlaster. When I load up the "soundfont Bank Manager" (sfbm.exe), I get a picture of a keyboard and some stuff that's pretty unintelligible to me, and the "help" doesn't help. I get the feeling I'm supposed to load instruments in one-by-one if I could figure out how to do it at all, which seems an excessive task. I know other people can do this, and I'm supposed to have a high IQ, but I really feel all this is beyond me. I wish I could just buy a sound card with good instrument sounds, plug it in, and have Noteworthy recognize the sounds without all this messing around.
Garritan does come with Kontakt, assuming by "Kontakt" you mean software of that name and not hardware. I have a really powerful aversion to the Garritan now, though, because it drove me nuts for a couple of weeks and I never got to first base with it.
I'm not going to get a "midi" cable and try to get that to work, because I know from experience I'll never be able to get that to work, even if other people can do it easily. And I also don't want any "stuff" on my computer that I can't avoid, it's nothing but trouble. I don't see why I would need a cable anyway unless "Kontakt" is hardware, which the "Kontakt" that comes with my Garritan is not.
Thanks for your help, but you may conclude, and I may conclude, that all this stuff will have to get a whole lot easier before there's any hope of my doing it. It makes my head hurt just to think about it. I look into the stuff on the web about soundfonts and am immediately bewildered.
Further adventures with the virus. As I noted "Microsoft Security Essentials" from Microsoft's site did take care of the worm that Avira didn't catch. However, my system seemed much slower after I installed the "Essentials". That meant that I couldn't convert my latest composition to WAV anymore, because the playback was full of glitches from system interruptions. (I have a seven-year old PC with only 512K RAM: I know I need something new and will be getting a new computer, one with expansion slots unlike the one I've been trying out.) When I looked at Task Manager, I saw there was something called MSMPENG.EXE that was taking up huge chunks of RAM intermittently, up to 90K. I suspected this came in with the "essentials" but didn't know that for sure, and everything I ran into on the web seemed to assume that MSMPENG.EXE came from something called "Windows Defender", which I don't have. I finally uninstalled the "Essentials" and now MSMPENG.EXE isn't popping up in the task list anymore. Also, my music is playing with fewer interruptions, so I'm hoping that when I temporarily turn off the internet, my AVIRA antivirus, and ZONE ALARM (using StartupCop) and reboot, I'll be able to get a clean play so that I can make a WAV file, and then I can start again trying to make the resulting WAV file sound decent by jacking the high frequencies up and the low frequencies down. Despinte going through fifteen or twenty trial CDs I haven't been able to get decent sound on my bigger non-computer speakers, though as I mentioned, the piece sounds fine on my computer with its smaller speakers. I assume that's just because I can't hear the undertones on my computer speakers. The piece also doesn't sound bad on CD if I turn the bass all the way down and the treble all the way up, but for some reason I haven't yet been able to do the same thing by messing around with the frequency response using GOLDWAVE.
Anyhow, I am impressed with Microsoft Security Essentials, but I guess I'm going to have to uninstall it whenever I want to make a WAV file, then reinstall it later, if I want to keep it on my system. I'm probably don't want to keep it installed all the time, since I think it slows everything down, but I do want to have it, so that I can reinstall it if I get another worm.
There is a file called "MSMPENG.EXE" in the "essentials" folder. I didn't see it at first since I usually use an alternative to "windows explorer" ("Total Commander) that doesn't see some system files. Commander does keep two lists side by side at all times, which makes it easy to move files from one directory to another, and it also doesn't have windows explorer's crazy half-alpha, half-numeric sort sequence that I find difficult to negotiate.
Richard Woodruffe expressed skepticism about USB soundcards, and I have that too. I have a USB auxilliary drive called "MyBook" which is great for backup, but very slow - so slow that if it's representative of USB response, I can't see it as being adequately fast for sounds.
Hi Milton, this is a reply to your latest post, though the lack of threading in this forum makes it hard to follow stuff. There is apparently a noteworthy "newsgroup" (also known as "usenet") named "ntworthy.nwc", which would be better organized since it is threaded, but there's never been anything in it that I've seen.
Supposedly it was Mark Twain (though it might well have been someone else, since Mark Twain, like Oscar Wilde, gets a lot of false attributions), who said that "Wagner's music is not as bad as it sounds." That's my favourite quotation ever about Wagner. I don't deny he was a genius. There are a couple of things I love, such as the orchestral "Dawn and Siegfried's Rhine Journey" from Goetterdammerung, and the "Evening star" aria from Tannhaueser but only (so far) when sung by Roman Trekel (I'm not an opera fan). The Siegfried Idyll goes on too long for my money, and the Venusburg music just sounds to me like complete junk.
I have seen the quotation you gave about Wagner before. I also have a cat, my third and probably my last since he's 4 now and I'm 65, so he'll probably outlive me. There's a great picture of "The Wagnerites" by Beardsley, which really captures the spirit. It's easy to find on "google images".
Toci's Beethoven sounds enough like Beethoven to be sure that it's not picking up just sound effects. It's just that on my system the orchestral synthetic sound is so bad that it's really not listenable at all. I'm going to get a new computer with a 8G of RAM rather than the 512K I have now, which will cut out the system-interrupt jitters when I try to make WAV files, but won't do anything for the quality of the computer sound, I don't think. I guess some people get good sound, but it seems like one has to be a techno-wiz with a lot of patience, neither of which characteristics I possess, especially not the latter.
I don't get those system-interrupt jitters on a computer I've been trying out but will probably return, which has 4G of RAM, and also is new, so the registry isn't all screwed up yet. There's no room in it for any cards though, which is my main reason for returning it. I like the tiny case, but not the lack of any expansion slots, since I will want at least a sound card which, no matter how deficient, will still be better than an onboard card. I have a Soundblaster card on my old system right now. It's a little bit better than nothing.
I guess this thread is long dead, but I thought I should check in. I've pretty much given up on getting better sound.
I downloaded the "Yamaha softsynth S-YXG50" that Milton suggested, but when I unzipped it and ran the only executable file in it, there was no difference: noteworthy had the same options it had before. I don't think the installation worked, since I was apparently supposed to see something in my add/remove programs list, but I didn't.
Thanks to Lawrie Pardy's script too, but all it does for me is show me how little understanding I have of this own subject. I'm lost right in paragraph 1. Shaping my own sounds is not something I'm interested in anyway. I'd just like to have reasonably good sounds, so that Toci's Beethoven symphonies sound something like Beethoven symphonies rather than deranged cats in a pots and pans factory. I'm not interested in making a career out of trying to get good sounds.
I wish there were a sound card I could just buy that would have good sounds, but the advertisements for them don't give me any indication of whether they do or not.
I don't even know what people are talking about with downloaded sound fonts. I don't know how to get them into noteworthy even if I could find them. I was wondering if my soundblaster card has some sounds I don't know about, but there are essentially no instructions that came with the card, so if there are, I haven't found them. It seems that other people know a lot of stuff about this subject but I'm clueless. It's not something that comes to me easily at all. I'd have as much luck trying to work on my own car. My Soundblaster card has sound that's scarcely better than an onboard sound card.
But thanks for the attempts to help me out. ------ I caught a bad virus a few days ago, which I got rid of, supposedly, with "Microsoft Security Essentials" from Microsoft's site. My Avira antivirus didn't even see it, but it was quite obvious I had a virus, and a bad one. The first thing it did was shut down my machine, presumably to set itself up. After a while, it was telling me that anything I clicked on was unrunnable because it was infected, though everything still ran fine in "safe" mode. The "Microsoft Security Essentials" program describes the danger from it as "extreme". It kept trying to dial the internet, but I have Zone Alarm so I could see it was trying to do that and could stop it. It looks like it was designed by professional thieves rather by than some adolescent. The virus is called "Trojan Downloader:BAT/Ftper.gen". Apparently it's one of a group of bad viruses that are going around. Here's part of the Description from "Microsoft Security Essentials". Category: Trojan Downloader Description: This program is dangerous and downloads other programs. Recommendation: Remove this software immediately. Microsoft Security Essentials detected programs that may compromise your privacy or damage your computer...
Although the virus is supposed to be gone, my XP machine is slower than ever now, such that I can't make WAV files without glitches even by turning off all the internet functions temporarily with StartupCop, and rebooting. Also, programs that have no business dialing the internet are supposedly trying to dial the internet now, which they never did before - those requests when I had the virus were just the virus in disguise trying to get access. Something's still fishy, though the Microsoft program says that the virus is gone. At least it's not shutting down my computer anymore to install its own stuff.
I know nothing, but I have experienced on my old computer that whenever I play a midi file, the midi sound level is set to zero afterwards, and I have to move the slider back up. On my XPcomputer, I do that by left-clicking on the thing that looks like a speaker in the taskbar, which brings up a subscreen with five sliders on it, one of which is "MIDI".
Re: "alternative to the run-of-the-mill GM sounds" It's a mystery to me how to add sound banks. There are so many things that are a mystery to me. I guess I'll have to look into how to do it at some point.
I just compared the sound of my old computer, which has a Creative SoundBlaster card in it, with the new computer that only has a REALTEK onboard soundcard, and the Creative is indeed better, though still not very good. Given my extreme lack of patience and skill for messing around with computers, I'm not willing to invest any more time in Garritan than I did five years ago (which was way too much, IMO: it was an exercise in utter frustration, which made me really unhappy and didn't reward me with any success at all).
It's too bad for me that people apparently care a lot about video on their computers, but not much about the sound on original music. I don't think I've watched a movie for at least a year, but I would like to have better sound.
I guess I can't keep my new computer. It's a Gateway 2800 series, which has a very small case. That's very nice, but the downside is that there are no slots to add anything, except for two small ones (I think) that don't seem to have enough space to add a card that has anything but printed circuits on it. I bought that computer from Costco, so I can return it.
Thanks for your input!
I was looking at reviews for sound cards on the web, and one that gets good reviews seems to be ASUS. Here's one model that Amazon has: http://tinyurl.com/y9xbd72
I bought the Garritan Personal Orchestra five years ago, but true to my general experience that the more I pay for something, the less happy I am with it, I was never able to get it, the most expensive program that I ever bought, to work at all with Noteworthy. I spent a couple of very frustrating weeks trying, then gave up. A few weeks later, I did get into a discussion with a guy, Andrew Koenig, who seems to know a lot more about computer sound than I do, and was trying to help me, but I just got more and more bewildered with the strange things I was doing that didn't seem to be getting me any closer at all to what I had originally expected. I had originally thought I could just "install" the program, then select instruments from the Noteworthy menu and have them play, but it turned out to be vastly more complicated than that, and too much for a technophobe like me. I've just finished a piece for strings and will be submitting it to the scriptorium after I get it copyrighted, but the Microsoft wavetable synthetic strings I have are not very good, and sound even worse when transferred to CD. The piano sound has always been fine on my computer(s), but it's the only instrument that is really acceptable.
Problem solved! I got a note from email support which got me thinking a different way, and now I have version 2 sounding as good as version 1.75. I see there's are three new notes from this message group that say much the same thing, which I didn't see until just now, but I didn't before appreciate that everything in the midi output boxes on either side was a playback device, rather than the two boxes representing two different functions. It might be easier to teach an orangutan how to use a computer than to teach me, I guess. All three of the new messages below seem to have gotten the idea of what was giving me problems, despite that I was pretty incoherent in explaining it and pretty inept at understanding the previous answers, because I was completely clueless about the nature of the two boxes in the midi control. Thanks to everyone for your help and patience. I hope it will all be as smooth sailing for me with version 2 now as it was with version 1.75!
This is a response from Geoff Arrowsmith to Lawrie Pardy and to Noteworth online admin
to Lawrie Pardy:
Thanks for your help, but I got the same result, the sound is as poor with the viewer in version 2 as it is using version 2 directly. The viewer would be a good way to send stuff out though, but I'd prefer to make WAV or MP3 files by recording the "what you hear" sound from my card, so as not to depend on other people's sound cards. I use a program called "GOLDWAVE" which does a super job on that, at least with 1.75, but I get all the stuttering because of my gummed-up 8-year old registry with that. I haven't tried it with 2.0 which seems not to have the problem that I have with that about 1.75. http://www.goldwave.com/ There's a pretty hefty pricetag on Goldwave, which I haven't paid. I only got it the other day, so I don't know yet if it will eventually stop working if I don't pay up.
I gather you're in Australia. If it's Sydney, you're approaching blazing hot season about now. I was there in 1999 or 2000 in February, and I couldn't believe how hot it was. I'd been planning on taking a side trip up to the Gold Coast, but after I got to Sydney, I didn't want to get any closer to the equator at that time of year.
to Noteworthy Online Admin
Thanks for your help, but as noted in the other thread, I've already tried that, and it didn't work. I may try re-installing SoundBlaster next, to see if that helps. Whenever I have a computer problem, it always seems to be something bizarre - I'm just star-crossed that way, I guess.
(This is a response to Richard Woodroffe's post. Unfortunately, I don't see any way to indicate what post within a thread that any response is a response to, as can be done with regular Newsgroups. There is an apparent noteworthy newsgroup "ntwrthy.nwc", but there's never anything in it, perhaps because this software community most unfortunately requires a login.)
Thanks, but I already tried that. In both versions, there's "Available play devices" with only one item in it, "Microsoft Midi Mapper" and two choices for "Devices used for playback" which are "Microsoft GS wave table" and "Creative Sound Font". "Creative" is the manufacturer name for my SoundBlaster card, so I guess that's what the second one is. There isn't any way to see when you start out which one is actually in use, as far as I can see, but I've tried highlighting each of the alternatives for "Devices used for playback" and pressing OK in both versions. No matter which I choose, the result is the same, good sound with 1.75 and poor sound with 2.0.
I just installed version 2, but I still have version 1.75 installed as well. Version 2 looks like it will take care of the stuttering problem I have with version 1.75, due to my gummed-up registry or something like that taking up time slices, which I haven't noticed is a problem with version 2.
I haven't played version 2 much though, because the sound is terrible. It's very tinny. Also, switching from mf to mp just switches, in version 2, from tinniness to muffledness, neither of which is pleasant separately. The abrupt change between them in version 2 is even less pleasant.
I don't know why version 2 sounds so different from version 1.75. I have both version 1.75 and version 2 set up the same as far as I can see. The SoundBlaster card is the only functioning sound card on my system, but version 1.75 still sounds great and version 2 doesn't.
Has anybody had this same problem of the sound in version 2 being far inferior to the sound on version 1.75, on Soundblaster or anything else, and if so, how did they fix it? I've tried a lot of things, but nothing I've tried has made any difference. (I'm not at all techno.)
Thanks, Geoff (Geoff Arrowsmith in Noteworthy Scriptorium)
I see this is an old thread, so I expect this problem has been solved already to the initiator's satisfaction, but I kept version 1.75 and just installed version 2. I can play both of them, but since Noteworthy files were associated with version 2 as part of the version 2 installation, If I want to play something in version 1.75 now, I have to start up version 1.75 then pick out the file I want to play with it. I can have both versions running at the same time though, no problem. Getting 1.75 to be the default version instead of version 2 would be easy. In Windows Explorer, highlight an ".NWC" file then from the toolbar choose "file"/"open with"/"browse", then hunt for NWC32.EXE in Noteworthy 1.75 or NWC2.EXE in Noteworthy 2.00, and set what you find as the new default application to run an ".NWC" file.
My problem is that I haven't succeeded in getting good sound out of version 2.00, even though the same SoundBlaster card is the only sound working on my system so the versions have to be using the same card. I'm going to start another thread to see if anybody else has had and fixed this problem.
Since I can run Noteworthy 1.75 and 2.0 at the same time, on the same file, I can flip back and forth to see if anything I do improves the sound on version 2, but so far nothing has helped.
