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First post, by Leolo

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Hi everyone,

I've tried VSC 3.23 in a Windows XP SP2 computer (AMD Athlon XP 3000+ with 512 MiB of RAM) with DosBox 0.63 but the sound is horribly chopped.

However, the Microsoft SoftSynth works perfectly.

Do you know why? What could be causing the choppiness in the sound?

I've checked the Task Manager and it shows a 8% CPU usage while playing, so I suppose that the processor is able to handle the load.

I've cranked up the cycles up to 15000, but it didn't make any difference, and the CPU usage barely increased.

EDIT: I should mention that I have no problems at all playing back MIDI files with Windows Media Player. The chopiness only happens with DosBox.

Thank you very much in advance.
Regards.

Reply 1 of 3, by Guest

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I forget the settings as I accidentally uninstalled VSC 3.23 last week [oh well, I have a real Sound Canvas anyway 😉] but there should be some setting in there to turn DirectSound off and to mess with the buffer lengths and all of that. I found that if I turned DirectSound off and moved the buffer to about 50ms, I avoided stuttering.

If this doesn't help, let me know what the config options are for output devices and the like [maybe take a screenshot?] and I'll let you know what to do from there.

Reply 2 of 3, by Leolo

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Thank you!

It's working perfectly now with a response of 68 ms. I've tried to lower it to 22.7 ms but the sound is very distorted.

By the way, let me ask you: is the sound of a real SC-55 very different to the virtual sound canvas?

It seems to me that the VSC has very weak reverb effects. Do you notice other differences?

Thank you.

Reply 3 of 3, by Kaminari

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Not very different. The VSC does a more than decent job at emulating a SC-88 Pro for a fraction of the price. Comparing it with my CM-500, the reverb effects are indeed not as powerful but they're not too shabby either.

Only problem is that, on a very few occasions and for reasons beyond my understanding, some patches are not the same at all on a couple of GS songs. Taking the popular All Stars demo as an example, the audience applause is replaced by something that sounds like the shouts of a crowd in a stadium, which is weird to say the least.