Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!scea!peter_alau@playstation.sony.com From: Elliott Lee Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.programming.sound Subject: Re: VAB Tools, Help Please Date: Sun, 28 Jun 1998 12:28:26 -0700 Organization: SCEA News Server Lines: 80 Message-ID: <3596995A.ADF6D85@shell.jps.net> References: <35963127.EAF612AB@reality-bytesX.demon.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: oak-port655.jps.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.05 [en] (Win95; U) Kevin wrote: [...] > I think my difficulties now are arising because I am unsure of the > definition of a few terms in use. > > What is a program ? > what is a tone ? Program and Tone are two things that make up a particular sound in the MIDI world. Say you have a bank of sound samples (pianos, guitars, guitars, etc.). A Program is an "instrument" made up of those sound samples. The Tones are the sound samples that are incorporated in the Program. For example, say you have a General Midi Drum program. It usually consists of 48-70 different Tones, each tone being a different sound sample. You would configure the Tones so that only certain keys respond to certain Tones---e.g. if hitting C3 played the bass drum, you probably wounldn't want the cymbal to be played at the same time. Another example, say you have an instrument which is a piano with strings and bells all played at the same time. You would create a Program with 3 Tones, one tone for the piano, one for the strings, and one for the bells. So why do they call it a Tone instead of just an audio wave sample? The reason is that a Tone is more complicated than just keeping the audio data. A tone describes how quickly the Attack or Decay (see the ADSR envelope in the User's Guide, I think) or the amount of reverb and so on. In the old days when memory was extremely precious, you had things like the Roland MT32 MIDI box. Each sound sample was like 1K - 4K long and was looped. So, the Tone parameters were used to create a soft attack and long decay for, say, the violin sound. Then the Programs combined multiple Tones to create a nice warm sound. > I have managed to make a vag file called PING.VAG, using WAV2VAG.EXE > it also produced PING.RAW. (Believe it or not, AIFF2VAG works with WAV files.) > When I run vabtool.exe, it runs fine (I'm running my display at 1280 X > 1024) so no problems seeing the whole picture. how do I get PING.WAV in > to the VAB file ? I don't know how VabTool works, so I'll describe my process of making sound effects: 1) I start with a directory of sound samples. 2) I convert each one of them (some RAW, some WAV) into VAGs. 3) I create a DEF file and list each one of the VAGs in there. For sound effects, almost all programs have 1 tone. 4) I run MKVAB and that produces my VAB file. 5) I run MKVAB with the "-r" option to extract the DEF file from the VAB and I compare that against the DEF file I originally wrote. If both files are about the same, then the VAB- making process succeeded. If not, usually there was an error in the DEF file (e.g. typo, not enough spacing, not using tab characters for delimiters). 6) I run VABSPLIT to make the final product. If you're converting some MIDI stuff to SEQ format and need to create the sound banks (if you're not using the supplied General Midi banks), then you may end up having to do a lot of handiwork to create the multiple tones for each program. I hope that helps a little.... > Any help you can offer, I would be very gratefull for. > > Kevin > > Remove X from Address if you wish to Email me. -- Mata ne, ... ... - e! ::' tenchi@shell.jps.net ':: (Protocol) :: ACiD -/- ACS -/- pHluid -/- Yaroze :: (Tenchikun) ::. http://www.jps.net/tenchi .:: ''' '''