TRICKS FOR THE USER AND THE JOKER

Written by Mathias C. Hjelt
V1.2 - 16 Sep 95

NOW WHAT'S THIS?

This page is completely dedicated to the happy AWE user. To the one who likes his/her card, understands that the AWE is one of the coolest things invented since sliced bread, and accepts the facts without feeling insulted. (Now you may ask, does this mean I dedicate this page to myself? Very clearly, that would be against common practice, but yes, I'm a happy AWE user.)

This page is not as strictly critical and demanding as the other ones - it does not strive for ultimate sound-quality. It's just about various things you can do with your AWE, things that you perhaps wouldn't come to think of if you only read the manuals.

If you've got any cool tricks you'd like to spread, please let me know. I'll be more than glad to add more stuff to this page of ideas.



REALTIME VIENNA EDITING & TESTING

Ever felt bummed because Vienna and your sequencer program can't run simultaneously because both require full access to the AWE driver? Ever wanted to try out the instruments you're working at without having to save them, quit Vienna, and load them in the AWE CP? Ever wanted to change all those instrument parameters in realtime? Good. Send a bunch of thanks to Robert Sears (rsears@az.com) who told me this trick, and check this out:

Zoltan Janosy (janosy@tsys.hit.bme.hu) once wrote something called MIDI Router (MROUTER.ZIP), which as a matter of fact is nothing but a combined MIDI input and MIDI output driver. If you send stuff to it, and let some other program use it as an input device, that second program will receive all that stuff. What Robert Sears did was to let Cakewalk use MIDI Router as an output driver, and have Vienna use it for input. This way, everything that Cakewalk (or any other sequencer, for that matter) outputs, will be routed to Vienna, which in turn plays the music using the instrument that currently is being edited.

Unfortunately all MIDI channels will be played as one, using the current instrument of Vienna, so you'll probably want to mute all tracks but the one containing the stuff you want to use as test music. Let the sequencer play that track, and feel the joy of realtime editing by moving around the sliders in Vienna - envelopes, LFOs, layer volumes, panning, whatever! This can of course also be done on drum kits - just enable percussion mode in Vienna.

In theory, EsBeeKay could also be used for this, but it doesn't update parameters in realtime when you move the sliders, so it's not as much fun as with Vienna.



SAMPLE PROCESSING USING THE EMU

The fact that the Effects Engine and the filters of the EMU only can process the output of the synthesizers does not mean they can't be used for adding effects to sample files. If you do it on samples you've digitized using the AWE or any similar cheapish sound-card, you won't lose much in terms of sound-quality, but professionally recorded samples or stuff you've transferred digitally from an audio CD won't be professional after this. But as long as you're going to play back the samples through the AWE, it won't make any difference, and you won't notice anything at all.

What you simply have to do is to load your WAV file into an SBK, for example using Vienna, play it through the EMU and digitize it once again. To make this re-sampling possible, you just have to route the synth channel to the record bus by enabling its little red dot in the AWE mixer under Windows, remove all other red dots around and set up the volumes so that you get a suitable recording level. If the volume is too low although you have all volumes at max (also the patch volumes etc in Vienna), you can choose between two things: either increasing the recording gain which will lots of noise, or taking out the signal through the line out, amplifying it with a decent preamp, and stuffing it back into the AWE through the line input and enanbling the line in's record mode instead of the synth channel's. Do whatever you find more suitable for you.

When the set-up is done, load a sample editing program (CL's WaveStudio if you've got no better) and a SBK editor (like Vienna). Prepare your SBK for being played, make the sample program start recording, and trigger your SBK sound. Stop the recording, and examing the results. It is possible that you'll have to fight for a while to get the volumes and such stuff right. I suggest you the trig the SBK sound from the piano-like keyboard in the SBK editor rather than a MIDI keyboard, since otherwise you'll have even more trouble getting the volumes right. Both Vienna and EsBeeKay allows the user to set the velocity of the note hits done on the virtual keyboard. Set it to max along with all other volumes in the SBK editor. If you got too much volume, i.e the sample clipped, decrease the synth channel's master volume.

What kind of processing is it possible to do this way? Here are a few examples and suggestions you could try out:

Reverb & Chorus
Backwards reverb Filtering Mixing & layering Controlled pitch shifting This kind of re-sampling can turn out to be a useful tool when working with sample files and sounds that are to be used in SBKs. However, the result can never be professional. If you still don't understand why, check out my pages about why the EMU sucks and why the A/D converter (digitizer) sucks. (If you have a sampling card with S/PDIF input, you can skip the stuff about the ADC, but if you have such a device, you probably have a real effects processor too).



TO REVERB OR NOT TO REVERB

We should all know by now that the Effects Engine only provides goodies for the EMU and the FM synth. We also know that many games have software-synthesized music (like MOD, S3M etc) which is played through the wave audio channel of the sound card. When game after game only has got mod music, you get a slight feeling that a SB16 or a similar card would have been a better investment that this AWE, filled with strange and expensive effects processors and such stuff that never is used.. When that happens, there's one thing you should check out.

See, some games with software-synthesized music let the user specify what kind of card the music is to be sent to. Instead of selecting a SB16-compatible mode, try something that may seem very odd: Adlib / FM. If there is such an option available, it'll either start playing annoying FM-synthesized music, or -- play the mod-style stuff through the FM synth!

Playing samples and mod-style music through an FM synth would of course be a terrible idea unless the AWE had the Effects Engine. But with effects - lots of reverb and chorus - the result can be rather astonishing. Not HQ, but powerful - real stereo, ambience, etc. The music does of course also come out through the S/PDIF connector, for those who are interested. Great fun. All you need to do is to set up the effects levels using AWEUTIL, and then run the game and try to make it understand it should pretend you've got an Adlib instead of a SB16.

If the game refuses to do this, you could give the FM-synthesized music a try anyway. In some cases, the cute sound of an FM synth drowned in reverb and chorus is more pleasant than that of a low-quality mod playing through the wave audio channel. In some cases, it isn't. But it's worth a try.

So now you're all waiting for a complete list of games that can do it. Sorry, got no such. And that's simply because I don't give a darn about games - I have better things to do with my PC and my AWE. In any case, I happen to know that games like Pinball Fantasies can do this, i.e play the mods through the FM synth. If anyone know the names of other games that work, please mail me so that I can list a few more examples here on the page.



THE BUILT-IN MIKE

It's my utmost privilege to announce that your AWE very likely has got a built-in microphone - undocumented, unknown, and unwanted. Life's like that - just when think you've seen it all, you bump into things that makes you wonder if the answer really may be 42 or not.

Look at it from the bright side: when you one day realize you have to record a voice message and remember that you long ago dumped Creative's Hands-Free mike that was going to "revolutionize your desktop", there's no need to panic - just open your computer, and start screaming into the AWE. You'd better make sure you're alone in the room, because you need to scream unbelieveably loudly.

Seriously put, there is some component in the analog part (i.e the end that has got the line in / out connectors and the rest) of the AWE that acts like a condenser microphone. It is probably some small ceramic capacitor or similar device, maybe a coil, that reacts on mechanical vibrations by changing its capacitance. Now, were not talking about any kind of sound-quality, high sensitivity or anything like that, we're just talking about a device that injects noise into the system when you expose the analog part of the AWE to vibrations.

The sound level of this little sucker is very low - you really have to boost all volumes and gains, including the microphone input channel, if you want to hear it. Therefore, I don't think it pays to isolate the AWE completely from the noise going around in the machine - the difference would be equal to zero at normal volumes.

My AWE does this, and one other guy on the net reported a similar phenomenon, but that doesn't mean that all AWEs behave this way. To find out wether your does it or not, bang all volumes you can find, and start scratching the rim of the AWE's board or knocking carefully with something that won't do short circuits. It may take some time before you find the place that produces the loudest sound - if you get an results at all, that is. The problem is that your amp has got to produce an output louder than the direct sound, i.e the one that your fingers cause when they hit the AWE. If you're using some sort of cute little multimedia-speakers, you can forget about this. A hifi set with lots sound ought to do it.

Now you may ask - why the heck does anyone care about weird stuff like that? Why foam about anything as stupid as a mike that doesn't even work properly? Why bother, when you instead can sit back and enjoy the ______ of the ______ _____ instead? To findout what that _____ is, keep on reading..



THE BUILT-IN SPEAKER

Miracles always work in pairs. If you have a built-in mike, you can't do without the opposite - a built-in speaker. The AWE does of course have that kind of a device too, and it is much better than the mike. Once again, it's probably a ceramic capacitor (maybe even the same component that does the mike-trick), and therefore it has got no bass - I estimated it's lower end to be somewhere around 400 Hz. It is at its best at kHz-frequencies, of course. Feeding it with a test signal from a sine generator connected to the line input, I determined the highest frequency that my ears was able to recoignize or the built-in speaker able to output - it was somewhere between 18 and 19 kHz.

I consulted people on the net and in real life about this, and most guessed that this phenomena is caused by low-quality components - which the AWE is filled with. Knowing exactly which one is the speaker is impossible, but that's not a very big problem, is it?

To try this out, disconnect all outputs from the AWE, crank the volumes and gains, and let it play a tune with lots of high-end. STARMAN.MID works fine for instance. I suggest you remove the cover from your machine, otherwise the sound may be difficult to hear. If you don't hear anything at all, you've got no built-in speaker. If you hear music coming out of nowhere, you've got one. The sound is not loud, but when I put my cooling system and harddisk into stand-by mode, another person who was around 10-12 ft away reported he could hear the tweeting high-end over there. Even when the harddisk and cooling are running, the music can be heard as a tiny whisper if you listen carefully, near the machine. Why don't you try it - it's real fun to sit with the whole head dug down into a PC, listening to Mozart through a non-exsistent speaker that definitely should not be there.