Re: Multitimbral Music Devices - Question and Proposal
Re: Multitimbral Music Devices - Question and Proposal
- Subject: Re: Multitimbral Music Devices - Question and Proposal
- From: Marc Poirier <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 11:13:23 -0500 (CDT)
On Tue, 15 Jul 2003, Frank Hoffmann wrote:
>
Urs, sorry to insist, but multitimbral Audio Units just add another
>
layer of unneeded conceptional overhead. There is no need for that and
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you can see how much confusion it creates with VST. And there is still
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no clear concept how to handle the scenario. Neither on the host nor on
>
the client side. They just shouldn't. The mistake was to allow
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multitimbral plugin in the first place.
>
>
The concept of multitimbral comes from hardware synthesizer, where it
>
made sense for cost reasons. But for the virtual studio there is simply
>
a lack of need for something like this. Hence somebody wants to
>
simulate a virtual instrument with say a drum machine and a synthesis
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part, why shouldn't he create one Audio Unit for the drum machine and
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one for the synthesis part? There is no disadvantage, but it buys you a
>
lot more flexibility. Of course the virtual counterfeit wouldn't look
>
exactly like the original anymore. But this point is mood, you also
>
can't simulate the feeling of actually touching the keys this way.
I think that this has mostly born out of Cubase's weird (in my opinion)
approach to handling audio instruments. They have always tried to present
it all with a strange hardware analogies (how many windows in Cubase are
called "devices"? yeesh) and, I'm not sure about now, but at least for a
while, you could load no more than 8 software instruments in a song.
Which is a pretty severe limitation, but their idea was that the
instruments be multi-timbral, so you could get 16 instruments out of each
instance. So this approach kind of forced most softsynth makers to make
their stuff be multi-timbral just so that folks could manage to get
anything done with Cubase.
Now Logic also contributes to this in a way because, in Logic, there is no
way to play more than one software intrument "live" (i.e. with realtime
MIDI input). So the only way to play more than one instrument, in at
least some sense, is to use a "multi-timbral" software instrument and then
at least be able to play up to 16 versions of that. Although I have a
feeling that Logic will be coming up with some solution to allow more than
one instrument track to be played live at the same time...
Marc
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