Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: Alex Herbert Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.programming.sound Subject: Re: Standard_VAB_Names Date: Tue, 04 Aug 1998 17:18:45 +0000 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 42 Message-ID: <35C73464.8B687FA@ndirect.co.uk> References: <01bdbf8f$41340a40$7bbff7c2@manolo> Reply-To: aherbert@ndirect.co.uk NNTP-Posting-Host: dialin2-52.ndirect.co.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.04 [en] (Win95; I) Emanuele Diotallevi wrote: > Hi guys,thank fo all informations ,now i 'll to know the name of each > standard tone,and if someone know how i can create a new bank. > Thanks ,Emanuele Diotallevi Just to let you know... The standard vab follows the GM (General Midi) standard. GM was introduced by Roland (who make audio-production stuff, synths etc) so that compositions recorded on one synth can play with the correct sounds on another synth. (As long as they are both synths are GM.) All GM synths have the same first 128 instruments (programs). Not all GM synths sound the same, but at least the sounds will be similar. GM is like the synth equivalent to ASCII. GM synths tend to have much more memory for their wave tables than the PSX, which means that the standard vab has a lot of duplication of sounds. E.g. many of the guitar sounds in the standard vab sound identical, whereas on a synth there would be subtle differences between them. Fortunately, there are a lot of people with GM synths and soundcards, and there are thousands of tunes to be found on the net in GM format. So, you can download a midi file, convert it to a .SEQ file, and play it without modification on the PSX using the standard VAB. Cool eh? But, because of the shortage of wave table memory on the PSX, the tunes hardly ever sound as good as they should. Having said that though, it's unlikely that a tune will use anything like the 128 GM programs available. This means that you can build banks of sounds yourself which only contain the sounds used in the midi file. I can dig out a copy of the GM program specification if you like. Let me know and I'll post a copy here. Herbs