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LIVErator: Sound Blaster Live in a box

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First post, by floomsy

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Hello VOGONS, this is my first ever post here.

Last year I started working on a device to fill a specific niche of mine -- that is, I needed a way to use sounds from out of a SB Live to sequence from my Windows 10 machine. The reason for this is there were some old soundfonts from Hammersound (Gort's Synth and some others) that were designed using loads of resonant filters, and those filters don't get treated the same throughout the different generations of Sound Blaster soundfont devices, or soft-synths for that matter.

I'm using Python 3.4 with the rtmidi library to feed incoming MIDI signals from the gameport into the SB Live synth to create audio. There's also an LCD text display and keypad I've gotten to work, complete with an animated bar activity display. However this is my first time creating any type of front-end interface, so while the backend is reasonably neat, the interface is VERY messy behind the scenes. And, yes, it's a regular Windows PC underneath -- I'm using an NVIDIA ION board to run the show. Overkill, I know, but that was what I had to work with.

I've posted up some demonstrations on my website including a track I've made that uses the sounds which come out of it.

I settled on the name Liverator from "Live Generator". The device is rather basic looking, that's a mini-box M300-LCD enclosure. I haven't got the skills to design my own at the moment. I spent somewhere around $160 in parts to build this device. Some other pieces were spares, like the motherboard.

It's been dormant for some time, but I'm now planning to add a second MIDI connector (to use all 32 MIDI channels the card has) and Toslink optical out, which I will build as a custom board to substitute the Live Drive.

I hope to some of you out there this has some degree of interest, thanks for reading.

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Reply 1 of 3, by Pierre32

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I love this. A truly one of a kind MIDI module, and niche as you like. The M300 enclosure even has the feel of some of the later desktop GM modules.

In all the MIDI discussion I've seen here over the years, I've never seen the SB Live's particular characteristics discussed, so that is quite interesting to learn about. I'm not asking you to do it, but I would be curious to hear some comparisons highlighting the differences to other cards/modules.

Reply 3 of 3, by floomsy

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Thanks for the feedback. I was pretty exhausted when I wrote that first post, so that's probably why it was all over the place. I was doing some research on the Live Drive connector and was reminded this forum existed. I'm not sure how I've gone this long without making an account, as someone who likes vintage computer hardware.

An Audigy would have been the convenient solution because I wouldn't need to dedicate space on my desk to use the sounds, however Gort's Synth uses filters and layers in very ambitious ways that I've never heard in any Soundfont before, resulting in all sorts of odd and interesting sounds. Due to other engines' nuances in filter handling, those quirks don't all get preserved, in fact the resulting sounds tend to be completely different tonally. They definitely aren't unusable, but it's the principle that those sounds aren't being heard as the author intended. I am curious if they're treated any differently on X-fi cards since those use yet another chip, but I haven't got one to test with currently.

There's numerous Audigy variants out there, but the one I have to test with is the SB Live 24-bit, which seems to be a rebranded Audigy SE. I've gone ahead and uploaded some demos here to illustrate the differences between some different Soundfont engines and their handling of filters.

And, of course, I recognize this is very much a one-off use case, because odd, alien tones - like I'm using in these examples - don't tend to attract the curiosity of most musicians. I just thought the sounds were neat when I found them and wanted a way to play them back faithfully without breaking my workflow. The fact I was able to shrink it down into a DTM form factor with a control panel is just a bonus.

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