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Heads Up: Roland Sound Canvas VA VSTi Plugin!

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Reply 680 of 691, by Spikey

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Do you want to upload the compiled version, and we can check it out?

From the page itself:
"EmuSC is currently in an early development stage and is not able to reproduce sounds anywhere near the quality of the original synths..."

In other words, SCVA is currently a better choice, most likely, unless the author is downplaying their own progress.

Reply 682 of 691, by moturimi1

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Trelokk wrote on 2023-01-13, 16:16:

Here is the latest Win x64 build of EmuSC, if you want to try it.
Of course it's missing the SC-55 ROM files, those you have to get on your own.

I checked the provided EmuSc. I get sound, even though there are still a lot of issues.
Of course you also have to push the virtual power button of the Sound canvas device of EmuSC.
I only placed the Roms and I added a new midi port via loopMidi. That is it.
By the way, is your audio device also selected correctly?

Last edited by moturimi1 on 2023-01-16, 06:22. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 683 of 691, by EmperorGrieferus

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Trelokk wrote on 2023-01-13, 16:16:

Here is the latest Win x64 build of EmuSC, if you want to try it.
Of course it's missing the SC-55 ROM files, those you have to get on your own.

I tried it, but it says "Unable to read control ROM".

Reply 684 of 691, by mattw

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Trelokk wrote on 2023-01-13, 16:16:

Here is the latest Win x64 build of EmuSC, if you want to try it.

here are the results from my very brief test:
1. the "power-button" is not visible to me, at least not on my old CRT - I am not sure if that's brightness issue with my particular CRT or what, but it caused huge confusion, I was clicking around in hope the button is there. I guess it needs some white border lines or be made in similar style as for example the "level" buttons to avoid such problems.

2. single click on what I presume is the "power-button" (as I cannot see it, see 1.) causes immediate crash with Windows 7 x64 saying "emusc.exe has stopped working correctly". other than that "Dump MIDI files to disk" - works and the 2 demo songs from the ROM were saved to my disk, "View control ROM data" also seems to work fine.

[EDIT] BTW, for those of you who missed or even forgot (yes, I forgot myself, it was couple of years ago after all), Roland Sound Canvas VA VSTi by itself includes few SC88XY ROMs in its SCCore.dll:
Re: About Roland Virtual Sound Canvas 3

and SC-88 descrambling code is here:
Re: About Roland Virtual Sound Canvas 3

as well how I figure it our here:
Re: About Roland Virtual Sound Canvas 3

So, I think list of currently known ROMs is a good idea, even EmuSC doesn't support SC88 at the moment (as far as I can tell).

Reply 685 of 691, by Trelokk

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If I push that power button, the whole thing just closes. My assumption was it's turned on by default when you launch it. I am using the same MIDI port in loopMIDI as the S-YXG50 I normally use, but ofc if I launch EmuSC, I make sure I don't have FSMP open which I use for the Yamaha plugin.

The ROM files I used are these:

Control ROM:
roland_r15209363.ic23

PCM files:
roland-gss.a_r15209276.ic28
roland-gss.b_r15209277.ic27
roland-gss.c_r15209281.ic26

Reply 686 of 691, by Trelokk

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Update:
Managed to get it working. It was really about pressing the "Power" button in the end. Facepalm. Now that it works, boy I can say there's a long road ahead of the dev team. It sounds absolutely piss-poor. Instruments get interrupted while playing frequently, nothing sounds anywhere near the SC-55 right now. Whatever you are using right now for MIDI playback - it's better than this.

Reply 687 of 691, by mattw

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Trelokk wrote on 2023-01-17, 09:22:

...nothing sounds anywhere near the SC-55 right now...

I still have my same old question about the RIAA IIR filtering:

Re: About Roland Virtual Sound Canvas 3

and it's not applied just once, but twice. IMHO, it still needs serious investigation than be taken as a proven fact.

Reply 688 of 691, by skjelten

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Hi guys, just a quick comment: You can press spacebar to power on/off the synth (or start emusc with the "--power-on" or "-p" option if ROMs has already been selected).

Also, I have been wanting to improve the main GUI for a while, but it never reaches top priority with the time I have.

Cheers,
Håkon

Reply 689 of 691, by Trelokk

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Well, the whole thing is still far from really being usable, ofc. However, the general concept seems to be heading in the right direction. Any idea how far we are away from a full implementation? My subjective estimation/impression would be another 1-2 years, assuming development continues in a similar manner compared to now.

Reply 690 of 691, by skjelten

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Trelokk wrote on 2023-01-29, 22:58:

Well, the whole thing is still far from really being usable, ofc. However, the general concept seems to be heading in the right direction. Any idea how far we are away from a full implementation? My subjective estimation/impression would be another 1-2 years, assuming development continues in a similar manner compared to now.

That depends a lot on whether other people join in on the development. If I have to do the entire synth myself from start to finish it will be years away - if ever. I have spent a lot of time on this project to get it up and running in a fairly ok state, but I expected others to complete it 😀

That being said, I think the progress has been OK for this first year. Especially considering the fact that 11 months ago I had absolutely -no- knowledge about synthesizers, and I had not done any serious programming for over 10 years.

Reply 691 of 691, by Rincewind42

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James-F wrote on 2017-05-01, 08:30:
"Headroom.mid" will play a bunch of notes together to reach maximum volume where the SC-55 clips internally before the volume co […]
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"Headroom.mid" will play a bunch of notes together to reach maximum volume where the SC-55 clips internally before the volume control.
I found that SC-VA and SC-55 have the exact same headroom amount when matched using "Sine Mono.mid", they both clip at the same volume.
SC-VA clips at -0.1dbFS which is the maximum volume of the digital domain, and SC-55 will clip at -0.5dB at the inputs of the audio interface (mixer) while not clipping the inputs.
So once again, Roland did a fantastic job with SC-VA.

Are you sure about all that? Headroom.mid doesn't clip anything "internally" for me on my SC-55 pre-volume control, but it's actually a useful way to calibrate the volume control to ensure there's no distortion in the analog output stage. I need to keep volume knob at about 11 hour, otherwise I can clearly hear some fuzz/crackling type distortion when playing headroom.mid.

Verified with this with some "loud" MIDI files, e.g. Shadow Warrior:

6iTebdu.png

It's not really audible btw, even with max volume, but it definiltey shaves of the transients as you can see. I guess it sounds a bit "rounder" with the slight fuzz/overdrive, but I'll keep the volume at 11'o clock myself at all times.

I'm not sure about the clipping behaviour you've experienced with the SCVA either. I don't think it does any "analog modeling", it seem to be just doing float calculations, and I'm not able to overload / drive it into clipping or distortion however hard I'm trying (in REAPER, using a full 32-bit float mixing path). The weird dithering distortion (or lack of dithering, perhaps) on the reverb tails is definitely not there with the SCVA that is present on the SC-55 (although it's emulating the 8820, so probably that doesn't suffer from this low-level dithering problem).

In any case, thanks for the test tones, they're handy 😀

DOS: Soyo SY-5TF, MMX 200, 128MB, S3 Virge DX, ESS 1868F, AWE32, QWave, S2, McFly, SC-55, MU80, MP32L
Win98: Gigabyte K8VM800M, Athlon64 3200+, 512MB, Matrox G400, SB Live
WinXP: Gigabyte P31-DS3L, C2D 2.33 GHz, 2GB, GT 430, Audigy 4