| > Does anyone know if Digidesign's Sound Designer for the Mac supports
> the standard MIDI Sample Dump Format?
Yes...Sound Designer for the Mac supports SDS (Sample Dump Format) for MIDI.
Your Kurzweil does not show up in the list of supported samplers in Sound
Designer II...I dunno how this will impact things...
> If so, does anyone have this software....
I have Sound Tools..which includes Sound Designer II.
>I have a bunch of samples for a Kurzweil 250,
>and a program on the Mac that will convert them to Sound Designer format.
>If I could get them into SDF I could load them into a SDF compatible
Maybe......here are some excerpts from my Sound Designer Manual:
Although the SDS was meant to be a standard, there are a couple of "grey areas"
left undefined. The following two grey areas should help explain some of the
quirks of working with an SDS sampler.
1. There is no way of knowing (via MIDI) whether a sound is 'not sampled' or
'non-existant'. A 'not-sampled' sound is a sound location that is available
but as yet not sampled. A 'non-existant' sound is one that cannot be created
on the sampler (eg. "sound 33" in a sampler that only holds 32 sounds).
2. There is no way to determine from the Macintosh whether or not a sampler
will accept a sound. Some samplers will allow you to replace a sound, but not
transfer to an unoccupied location. Other samplers allow both the replacement
of a sound as well as the allocation of a new sound location.
If Sound Designer II attempts to transfer to a less cooperative sampler, a
"transfer unsuccessful" message will appear.
In general, sound transfers with an MMA (MIDI Manufacturers Assoc.) SDS sampler
will go smoothly if you are aware of the limitations of your sampler. You
should know how many sample locations are available in your sampler, and
whether your sampler will accept transfers to unoccupied sample locations.
>.. Kurzweil uses 10 bit samples who knows how the bits are packed, etc?!
This could present a problem... The Sample dump format for SD II supports only
12 and 16 bit samples.....(I am not very sure of this...but I will check).
Side comments:
Some of the above hassles made me bite the bullet..and trade in my Akai 950
for a MAC based sampler. SampleCell from Digidesign comes with a NU-bus
card and software to play back and edit the sampled waveforms. I use Sound
Designer to record (and edit too) the samples. The sample time is only limited
by the size of your hard disk. 10 meg for every stereo minute is expensive...
but the flexibility is worth it..IMHO.... SD II gives DAT backup support so you
can free up disk space for other use ...you can turn your computer into a very
good Digital recorder for a whole album....no loss of resolution throughout
your recording process!
Kris..
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Kris, thanks for the info.
Some comments:
I don't think it matters that Sound Designer lists Kurzweil as "supported",
and that it only supports 12/16 bits. The program I have will convert
the Kurzweil samples TO Sound Designer format. I would hope being in
Sound Designer format, that Sound Designer would be able to read them!
(unless their's some version incompatibility. This program/samples are from
1985 I think)
Your notes about my sampler successfully receiving the samples are good.
To tell you the truth, I don't even have a sampler that will accept SDS
yet. But that's one of my key requirements for the next one I purchase,
whether computer based or not. I just figure getting the samples into
SDS format would put me a giant step ahead. #1 if my sampler accepts them
I'm all set. #2 I can get the spec sheet for SDS files and I'll be able
to understand them and hopefully convert them to a format I can use,
whereas with the Kurzweil files, I'm lost. I suppose I could write to
them and see if they'll send the specs on them.
If you feel like giving it a whirl let me know. I'll just send you a couple
of the files in Sound Designer format and you can see if they work.
If they work and they're usable to you, convert them to SDS and send them
back.
-Tom (who is thinking about a computer-based digital system but needs $$)
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