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Standalone pc synth controlled by midibox..


mjproc
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I plan to build a pc based synth that's rackmounted and cotrolled by midibox.

I have several optinal ways to do this, not sure what I will use in the end....

Option 1:

OS: Xp lite or some modified xp system or windows 2003 server

Sound: Soundblaster (ooooooo crap,,,, yeah I know) Live or Audigy2 with kxdriver.

Sound option 2: Creamware Luna II /Pulsar II

Sound option 3: onboard soundcard

1: totally dismantke one of my retired laptops (PIV mobile 2.6GHz defect lcd) with a Audigy2 Zs card

2: reuse my retired shuttle barebone (AMD64) with a sblive (kxdriver)

If I reuse my old laptop, I will be able to use a 1U rack cabinet, prolly 2U with shuttle motherboard.

kxProject forums:

http://www.driverheaven.net/effects-dsp/93131-using-audigy-without-pc.html

Lex Nahumury has even built (prototyped) an embedded system with a sblive card running kx driver.  Not much written ately concerning that tho....

The analog synth created for kxdriver is very nice indeed!!! I recomend trying that (it's also controllable via midi)!!!

Challenges:

Windows..... you never know if the darn thing will boot..

Script parts of the windows application loading from a button in midibox (load the Analog synth, the drawbar organ or the analog drum synth)

Guess many others would use vsti or standalone instruments of some kind.....

Thoughts?

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sounds like an interesting project

  you say you have several options then only list one

  let me just explain what i understand from your post see if ive got it right

  you want to make  a synth that is pc controlled  hardware/software ??

  this is then controlled by using a midibox based control surface and you want to make this a custom enclosure

  is that right

regards kris

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  you say you have several options then only list one

Uhm..... hehe....

I guess Option 2 would be an embedded os like Lex Nahumury (kx project).  I can't see this a an easy way....

Option 3 cound be a linux system like Puredyne https://devel.goto10.org/puredyne or some ubuntu-ish distro http://ubuntustudio.org/

  you want to make  a synth that is pc controlled  hardware/software ??

  this is then controlled by using a midibox based control surface and you want to make this a custom enclosure

  is that right

Correct, I guess I could have a frontpanel like the midibox FM, definately a rackmound enclosure.

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as i say it sounds like an interesting project

  i still think i dont fully understand what you are planing but i think the problem is from my side understanding

  im still not shure if its a hardware synth or software

of the options you list i think the linux is probably the best (just my opion)

  if you decide not to use your retired shuttle i can put it to good use

  regards kris

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This is a repost of something I tagged on the end of a post about using waveblaster cards without a PC.

OK now for another, totally opposite idea.

How many AWE32's etc can you fit in a PC?

How about using an old PC using a basic OS/driver to run say 4 AWE32/64's as voices? MIDI in, and perhaps a MIOS based control surface. Something using a low power CPU, then it wouldn't need fancy fan cooling, run with minimal IO and graphics card for setting up. The AWE64 Golds is/was quite reasonable. I use one in my MP3 machine, because it has proper phono sockets. Given the (free) price of old PC's, I wonder if this is worth trying as a recycle? I've got two AWE32's sitting here, that I can't bear the thought of stripping for chips, (I mean, paid £120 for one way back when - I don't think I had a night out for 2 months to  afford it!).

Is this a thought? Even as a sample player it might be worth a try. I do like the thought of 'old PC as appliance' - like my smoothwall, another excellent community project. http://www.smoothwall.org/

My original idea was to get the PC to act as loader/controller for several old cards, I can see that there are 3 addresses available, though with soundblaster you might run out of DMA's. You could save IRQ's by ditching the serial and parallel ports, and perhaps even the floppy, at run time. I had this vision of benig able to get 3 or 4 x 32  soundfont voices, and all with parts that were essentially free. I'd use an ISA bus motherboard, and a very stripped down OS. Like this http://www.litepc.com/products.html. They do an embedded Win98 that is rommable and costs $25. They quote boot times of less than 4 seconds. If I could get it to boot from flash I'd be a very happy bunny. Store the sound samples etc on a laptop drive for quiet and cool. I had initially thought of a LINUX core set up especially, but the WinLite products mean no messing with drivers etc, it might be possible to get a 'quick and dirty' system up fast. The only real programming effort would be in the HUI.

Internally, some work on the power supply, such as seperate power for the backplane, and some shielding might go some way to keeping the PC' background hash out of the audio, and the current pull of a laptop hard drive woudl prevent the seek noise breakthrough I've had several times.

So my take was cheap PC hardware. Make a big stand alone expander based on old soundcards. A portable VST host sounds cool too, though a lot more CPU horsepower would be needed.

A few ideas anyway.

Mike

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Shuttle mainboard (small-ish formfactor) not shure if Shuttle use ATx / miniAtx or their own formfactor.

Plan is to remove the agp graphic card after system install, get a pci raisercard and modify the cpu fan.

CPU fan...  I plan to put this motherboard in a 2U enclosure (it''s now 3U high), use a 120mm papst (or equivalent) fan.  I then need to control the airflow in some way to a passive cooler on the cpu.  (often used in small formfactor pc's like home-entertainment systems)

Challenge:  PCI raisercard...  Anyone seen a raisercard that enables me to mount the pci card to the left of the motherboard?  The ones I've seen allways "raise" the pci cards to the right (seen from front to backplane).

Storage:

To keep the heat / noice to a minimum I hope use alternative sollitions to normal spinning harddrives like:

http://www.supertalent.com/oem/oemSata.php or SD media with ise adapter.  Anyone tested this in "real life"?

I don't plan to show any of the "PC" connection to the outside of the enclosure.  Would be nice tho to have easy access to storagemedia (sd card or oemsata) from the frontpanel (kind of like a mediareader type..)

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Hey!  That's exactly what I need!!  Didn't know they existed....

Does this mean I can use 1 flexible 11cm risercard, then attact 1 dual risercard to use two sb live cards??  (this will double the cpu power!!)

Not shure what the limitations are concerning pci.  (Pci bus on motherboard -> Risercard (11cm) -> Dual risercard -> pci cards)

Ole P

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i use a riser card in my all in one midi-box

but just a single card rigid

i tried the flexible ones but had problems but dont let that put you of trying them

i looked at making my own so i could mount cards anywhere but it seems theres

a power limitation on how far you can extend away from the socket

hope that helps kris

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i looked at making my own so i could mount cards anywhere but it seems theres

a power limitation on how far you can extend away from the socket

There is also a limit due to the speed of the PCI bus we're talking radio frequencies here, and this can cause very severe problems.

PCIexpress, is supposed to allow 'out of case' connectors, but I not seen any implmentations yet.

Mike

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Don't forget DOS  ;D  Okay, it's single tasking, but there's some interesting programs on that site, and your hardware overhead will be lower than even a stripped Win98.

For example:

"Midget is a DOS-based MIDI music program, which features support for General MIDI and Yamaha XG devices."

FM Tracker

"QSEQ is a complete sequencer for DOS/SoundBlaster, using both external MIDI and internal FM synth. A FM editor is included"

Elsewhere:  "Converter 1.5 is a very powerful and flexible real-time application providing an advanced MIDI input processor, clock sync'ed LFO to MIDI generators, filter bank -based audio to MIDI converter, gameport or joystick to MIDI converter, and mouse or touchpad to MIDI converter in an all-in-one solution. ... on older 486 or Pentium computers."

Harmony Central also has a DOS archive - pretty out of date, but there are some leads there worth following up.

Also check out Blue - a MIDIboxer's 2003 built embedded DOS keyboard, using AXS, an all-in-one softsynth, sequencer, drum machine, sampler, that also runs under Windows.

Interesting DOS Software has an audio section

While we're on the subject of riser cards, if you're thinking of using a laptop, there are adapters for mounting full PCI cards in a MiniPCI socket.  Some newish laptops use MiniPCI for a modem, NIC or WiFI card.

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Dos:  Like the idea, but I'm not a programmer,,,, and drivers for soundcards etc is my main concern (kx for sblaster cards, windows only for scope range)

Comnverter seem VERY nice!! I have a couple of old Pentiums (fanless  ;D) that could serve as host for a standalone  converter-ish 1U box.... Is it multiclient capable?

I read about the Blue project, it looked very interesting indeed, was it completed?  Could not find the axs for dos, only windows...

I don't plan to use softsynths as I find the asynth for kx suits my needs (same with the drumsynth) / or use my scope Luna II.  The main reason for this, is to keep it simple.  The controlsurface (midibox) is hard to make "general purpose" to use in many different versions of softsynths.

Creating controlsurface for asynth is easy (as the numbers of controllable parameters are limited (same with drumsunth)  I guess I can fit all knobs and buttons in a 2U frontpanel.

I will try to "design" a frontplate with the frontpanel app at a later stage.  I have the kxdriver running now with asynth & drumsynth.  Im using mbseqV3 & (as of now) a maudio prokey88 keyboard as controlsurface.

Thanks for the inputs!!

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A minor thought, since the cards are going to be busy enough without having to  act as connectors for the user interface, how about using an LTC and going into the PC serial port: Zero hardware at the PC end

Mike

I'm not sure if I understand what to try to do with the LTC?  LTC (Com) is just another way to communicate with the PC isn't it?  Not sure what the LTC will do as a positive effect..... (my attemps so far trying to use a widowz serial to midi driver for

the LTC is not sucsessful, in fact I haven't yet got it going)

Why use LTC?

Edited:  After reading my first post....  If using the onboard soundcard then the LTC would be beneficial if there were no gamecontroller port on the mainboard.  Still it is h**l to get the driver working....

For dos only synth, I guess the minimum to get sound, is in fact a soundcard, and the availability of dos drivers limits the soundcards to soundblaster-ish cards.... and afaik all those cards have a gameport-connector. 

(I can't still figure out why you would use the LTC.... :o )

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A minor thought, since the cards are going to be busy enough without having to  act as connectors for the user interface, how about using an LTC and going into the PC serial port: Zero hardware at the PC end

Why would you use the LTC Prof?  Have I missed something?

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Why would you use the LTC Prof?  Have I missed something?

I was thinking of speed, and using a direct PC resource rather than one on the soundcard - sometimes you can't use the on card MIDI synth and the on card MIDI port at the same time - depends on the card. Hence, (my thinking, not guaranteed), putting the control surface into a main PC resource will simplify things.

So far I've found references to people running two different coundacrds, but no more, on a standard PC. If I can find the right boxes I'm going to dig out a second AWE32 and try it.

One thing I did find for DOS, you may need a plug and play tool to get the later soundcards to run up. I think it only runs at boot to initialise the cards. I've got an old Intel tool for this, which may need a little research, as each card will want it's own address, interrupt and DMA settings.

Mike

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Not actually 2U enclosure,,,,,

Pesonally I'm looking for a 3U industrial case on evilbay, Stryd-One,  because that will be far easier to work on and adapt. If the rig runs fine, then is when I'll think about condensing it.

Still like the idea of boot from ROM or Flash. I need to see if Converter needs any disc as scratch space, if not it might be possible to run it without a hard disc, given that I can get nice, cheap compact flash discs, which, unlike SD or such like, look just like an ATAPI hard disc to the PC. If the thing needs scratch space, then it's not possible, because the write limit of the CF will soon be exceeded.

Mike

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Still like the idea of boot from ROM or Flash. I need to see if Converter needs any disc as scratch space, if not it might be possible to run it without a hard disc, given that I can get nice, cheap compact flash discs, which, unlike SD or such like, look just like an ATAPI hard disc to the PC. If the thing needs scratch space, then it's not possible, because the write limit of the CF will soon be exceeded.

You posted a link earlier to win98lite as an optional os.  Even embedded w98 like http://www.embeddingwindows.com/ would not occupy more than approx 20MB leaving plenty space for storage or "scratch space" on a 1GB CF card.  Even adding a 2nd CF to IDE adapter to the setup will be cheep :-)  One internal CF for OS, and 1 external accessible CF for storage etc....

I use a 3U industrial enclosure today with my Creamware setup.  It's solid and heavy..... too heavy... I also find the pc/server 3U industy enclosure too deep (allmost the deep as wide)  I want to be able to easy carry the "PC-midibox-synth" hopefully in a rackbag...

Prof: Do you plan to only use Converter or as a multipurpose synth-midibox-pc?

(As I still have some old motherboards with fanless intel pentium 233, I guess I could stuff it inside a 1U enclosure as a Converter only box.)

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Couple other ideas-

For anybody sticking with 98SE or 98lite, the notorious Lexicon Core2 has served very well here under those, just so long as you're not trying to run brand new motherboards or chipsets (not sure about those, but it's been OK on an unsupported AthlonXP here). It's a dirt cheap card with 4 analog inputs with switchable DBX compression and 8 outs. Also has ADAT and S/PDIF (optical or coax) and the analog and S/PDIF stuff is in a small breakout box which doesn't have much circuitry to it (just some passive junk maybe at the S/PDIF part). You can wire whatever part of the analog i/o you wanted to a 25 pin sub connector and not use the box. The analog i/o sounds surprisingly good, but I've only done multitrack stuff with it, using outboard cue signals. I'm not sure how tight the latency can get for doing something like VSTi's.

I've also had decent success with the onboard S/PDIF of some of the really cheap sound cards, even dating back to the ISA Epoch days (required a small TTL converter circuit, but worked). That's showing up on lots of cheap stuff now, as are actual ASIO drivers. There are CMI based (83x8 chipset) boards and cards around here which will run a MIDIMan DiO 2448 driver for really low latency.

George

PS- Back when I was playing with MAME junk, I remember people running COM port LCD displays to monitor the startup process. Always wondered how much they could do and what was needed, if anybody here knows. Booting straight into a DAW app with a MIDIBox front end and no screen would be great, but I could see where hitting one little bump would knock you flat on your ass. I ran for a long time here with a giant fixed frequency monitor on something. It was fine after Windows loaded, but if anything went wrong, you were screwed. 

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