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When you buy a sound-card, you pay primarily for the hardware, while receiving additional software such as drivers and some applications. The drivers usually only interface between the Windows operating system and the sound-card hardware, but their capabilities are much greater.
WAVE-CUBE , developed by the Audio/Video Technology group, is a smart generic audio driver that can be added to your system. It provides Wavetable-Synthesis while music is being played. No additional hardware is needed; everything is done using software and your Pentium CPU.
Most users have sound-cards that only support FM-Synthesis and digitized-sound capabilities because of the attractive price of these simple cards. WAVE-CUBE software provides an additional driver that is transparent to the user and that works with any standard Windows application. The sound-card's FM-Synthesis is bypassed, as WAVE-CUBE provides a superior Wavetable synthesis quality, which uses the general resources of the computer (i.e., the Pentium processor and the general purpose memory).
Images
- WaveCube LOGO
Software-only Wavetable MIDI Synthesizer, version 4.0
- WaveCube GUI
The following GUI is part of the WaveCube package. The GUI enables the user to move the General MIDI instruments in 3-Dimensional space and to hear the effect in the synthesized audio. Alternatively, the user can move the microphone icon around the screen with a similar effect on the synthesized audio. The user can also specify which icon should be in solo or mute mode and control its relative volume. For best results, a Pro-Logic (Dolby) system is required.
Demos
The following demo shows the same piece of music (MIDI file) played by a standard FM-Synthesizer and then by the WaveCube Wavetable Synthesizer. For this demo you need to be able to play 22.05KHz, 16-bit, standard WAV-files (stereo).
Background Information
A common sound-card has two types of output:
- WAVE-OUT: A D/A that gets digitized sound as input and converts it to an analog signal that the speakers can handle.
- MIDI-OUT: A DSP code that gets MIDI events (commands) and produces (by means of synthesis) digitized sound that is then sent to the D/A. This DSP code is part of the sound-card hardware.
There are two major MIDI synthesis techniques:
- FM-Synthesis: An old method that approximates the typical wave-form of each instrument using a set of parameters. This method is relatively inexpensive to implement (in terms of CPU, and other hardware resources), so many sound-cards use this technique for the MIDI-OUT capability. The drawback of this method is that the quality of the synthesized music is quite poor, especially for instruments such as acoustic-pianos, strings, and percussions.
- WaveTable-Synthesis: A relatively new method that uses small digitized recordings of the real-instruments as the basis for the synthesis process.The set of instrument recordings is referred to as the Wavetable Database or as the instruments sample set.
The quality of the produced sound is affected both by the quality of the database and the quality of the signal-processing algorithms used in the Wavetable-synthesis process. One of the main drawbacks of this method is that the Wavetable database requires dedicated on-board memory. This expensive on-board memory cannot be used for anything else other than MIDI synthesis. Having on-board memory makes Wavetable synthesizers relatively expensive (around $250), compared to the FM-synthesizers (around $70). (Prices may be outdated).
WAVE-CUBE is a product of Altec Lansing Multimedia Technologies Inc ®.
The technology and algorithms were developed by the IBM Research Laboratories in Haifa.
The Wavetable-database was created by E-MU ®.
WAVE-CUBE support and marketing is being done by Altec-Lansing Multimedia Technologies Inc ®.
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