cheater

hint - try searching it :P

Since I can't make photos... we'll have to revert to our imagination here 8) 1. take a led. looking at it from the side (one lead is hidden behind the other) bend both leads to the side so they're completely perpendicular. 2. take a small tactile switch. 3. take some really good glue. The best would be the two-ingredient kind, I guess. glue the led on top of the small tactile switch. 4. you're done! three-mm leds are best for stability, they're the same size as the switch itself. you can now solder the switch on a small piece of protoboard, clip the led's leads short and connect them with cables to the protoboard. then you can screw the protoboard to the case or mounting rails. if something goes broken (led OR switch OR glue) just make a new one :D good thing about those switches: they're mega-tactile. Unlike normal swtiches with caps, those give you the EXACT feel of the switch. no slack at all. another good thing: you don't need schaeffer to make button holes for you anymore :P and you can have multi-colored leds too! :)

Thanks a lot for clarifying this to me! :) cheers, damian

Thanks, Thorsten. However, I'm still saying I could probably try to figure it out on my own later on (after exams), no need to use up your time. I was asking just to know if it's readily available or if I'd have to try and add it on my own. Btw, if you say there's a small demand for this - wouldn't it be better to spare the globally available settings and just make it a mios hack (e.g. uncommenting stuff)? Perhaps everyone could have their own set of those "hacks" that they could assign the leftover bit flags to. Just an idea, as I've often seen you shun on changes that use up parameters.

I'm sorry - I never wanted to sound smart-ass. I just wanted to mark which possibilities could rise from such an application. Since you put this that way, I do not know what the benefits would be with those DACs. However, no DACs are perfect, and this makes them more "like they should be" - this can especially work with the YAC if it's a simple circuit. I'd imagine the highest harmonics (thus, the ones with least energy - which means they're "kept" in the less significant bits of the DAC than the "loudest" ones) of sounds would get less distorted in loud moments. I figure that's one of the negative points of such DAC setups: good for dynamics, not as good for background detail. They're much more suited for single instruments, as single sounds don't have much background detail. I can't tell - but I'm guessing such a DAC chip as the YAC used for completed music would result in mutilating it severely. You'd just have to try this, though. That's just my guess. I remember comparing my Yamaha DX11 with its copy, the FM7. The FM7 sounds better.. I did not copy this text from that website, I haven't been there for at least half a year, until today to bring up some data. I've learnt this stuff from being an assistant in a recording studio, and from working in a high-end audio equipment shop. I still remember doing the math pen&paper style, but I don't remember it all clearly anymore, this was like 2 years ago :-X . I believe with a linear DAC, the bit quality rose as log_2 (sqrt(x)) where x is the amount of paralleled DACs. I remember the website has an error in the explanations, where they don't include the logarithm in the formula. Oh well. http://dddac.de/ma_dac21.htm#intro Check it out yourself. Besides, it doesn't cost anything to test it, so if someone wants to, they can try. Not much work with soldering another chip on top of the old one, either. I'm just posting this for others to try - they (you too!) don't have to, if they don't want to. Let's not fight over this as if it was really that involving or hard to try out, or that important and crucial for the project :) cheers TK

Because then, when using an external filter/delay/fx box that has midi and sync-to-bpm capabilities, I could use it with that. No need for a third device that generates midi clock to slave both of them. Filter boxes can never generate midi clock - and even if they would, it would be very much impossible to sync one to a turntable... However, if you think that's hard, unnecessary, or a loss of time, a simple "no" or "you'll have to add this feature yourself" is enough. I communicate what I'd be happy to see in those great tools that you have created. If nobody ever said what they'd find cool, you (and other people) wouldn't know. I'm not telling you, however, that my wish is your command - do you feel you have to reply to every topic, that you have to be the one who implements all the features? You said yourself that other people are supposed to do the work as well. So why not leave easy/unnecessary/uninteresting jobs to other people? If somebody really wants something implemented, they will accomplish this, even without your help. Regarding your question whether I have an MB SID: I'm at university, it's back home. This is why I'm sometimes asking things which might possibly be answered by simply having one, physically. If you find this annoying - I'm sorry. I never meant to be like this; I'll try to hold off with my "urgencies" in the future, then.

I was asking because I want to take this stuff with myself to the dancefloor... can't take my PC with me there... No need to be like that! We're not here to make eachother's life to the worse, after all, are we..? ;)

No TK, it's not about hearing the difference! It's actually about *not* hearing the difference! I believe those DACs are 12-bit, right? Due to different reasons, the actual output quality is probably somewhere in the range of 7-8 bits. This means 5 bits go lost, and we get more noise with less dynamics. They don't entirely go lost, though - the quality of single samples, completely randomly, goes up and down between those 7 and the max 12 bits. Now a bit of probabilistics: if you repeat an experiment enough times, you'll get more "correct" outcomes. This means: if you decode a single sample in 8 DACs, you'll get the correct outcome (less noisy sample) with more probability. But (!) you never know which DAC it will come out of... so what you do is that you take all those signals together - some are only as good as 7 bits, some are better, and you mix all of them and get an average signal, which is still much better than those 7 bits. This way we could make the Midibox FM less noisy and more musical :) Maybe the sound will be less "thin". Just compare samples of a single DX7, and the same sample played back in Native Instruments FM7 - the synthesis is *completely* the same, the only thing that differs is the 12-bit DAC of the DX7 versus the 24-bit DAC of your sound card....... :)

I can't have the MB SID generating midi clock on its own, can I? ??? The beta release is already available on request In fact everything is finished since 2 weeks, only the documentation is missing ;-) Best Regards, Thorsten. (need hardware too - a full-fledged version, not what I have :D)

How do you make the ribbon controller? :)

Hey guys, I've been looking at the Midibox FM project lately and the dddac.de website came to my mind... there, the dude takes several pieces of the same DAC chip and puts them all in parallel (he actually puts them one on the other!) to make the conversion more reliable. He uses 8 in parallel. There's some higher mathematics involved in this, but this does work. The same approach is used in highest-grade CD players and in some studio equipment. So I'm wondering - would the same thing be possible with the Midibox FM? If you get two chips, you probably have 2 DACs anyways ;) And they're pretty cheap to get - for example, cards with chips that are interesting to us can be bought for 1 zloty in poland (!) (that's about 0.30 Euro)... and shipped for 5 zloty ;P So that makes, what, less than 2 euro for the whole thing? I think it may be worth trying it, don't you? :)

Does this mean we may be able to port the midiboxes to different chipsets down the road? :) *cough*midibox dsp*cough* 8) :P

Hey guys, all I can say is: this project is great so far! stryd_one: I'm very sorry to hear about your situation right now. Did you lose your stuff as in... you sold it, or did some disaster happen? In any case, I hope your life gets back together and your girlfriend gets out of her illness. Don't push yourself too much - cut back here and there if it's possible, the gains are never worth the stress, trust me... Perhaps this means you'll have to put this project in the drawer for now, but I personally think people are more important than electronics :) Perhaps someone decides to follow your tracks, in that case I guess they'll be able to, with the source code etc... at everyone: don't let this project die! There's a load of great analog drum schematics out there, not only 909/808... see the CR-78 and CR-8000, for example. Or perhaps latin drum sounds... who knows! (personally, I think every drum kit would do real well with a simple sampler for playback of digital drum samples... hint hint ;) ) cheers, and keep up the great work guys!

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Cool! I'll check out the samples. Thanks for giving me the tip!

How'd you get at the samples? I'm thinking of ALPS or P&G faders, but I don't know if I really need them that much. And paying $100 for a test is a bit too much for me :L

Hey, has anyone checked them out? They have some interesting stuff there... the pg crossfaders (pgfx3000) are the standard in heavy-duty dj applications, they just don't wear down :D they also have motorised faders, compact motofaders, they have great pots, endless belt digital controllers (cheap + quiet motofader replacement?) and last but not least motorised JOYSTICKS! definitely worth checking 'em out :) http://www.pennyandgiles.com/products/products.asp?strAreaNo=402_6 A nice comparison of ALPS and P&G faders (only in german - has nice pictures, though): http://webbeatz.de/Specials/PennyandGiles/main.php

It's not gonna run away. You have plenty of time to learn 8)

Can't wait till I get my hands on it. DJs in my city will go crazy. Something I can't figure out on my own... will it be able to sync the WT sequencer to BPM, and perhaps to fractional BPM values? (would be great for DJ performance)

Too bad you can't control this in real time... :(

Hey guys, just wondering... has anyone tried this with a 303 filter? Seems cheap to make.

I believe you can use typical 3.5" 2HD disks! Also, I think all of them just use FAT-12 (typical MSDOS disk format).

Very neat job indeed! Did you make the panel yourself? Nice display... is that plexi cut down to size? Where did you get the display? It's so clear!

I will eat your powerplants. KILL ALL HU-MANS!

Let's have the core module support at least 25 different ram types. The PCBs should have sockets for each type of packaging of each of the ram types in each size. We'll also need several voltage levels there. Please? Also, I want it to control my fridge. Seriously though: there's a reason why MIOS is only available (officially) for one type of PIC.