: has anyone tryied the roland vsc-88h . its a virtual sound canvas . i'm looking for feed back .

I wish. I asked Chia from AVM about it, and he said they were not available
in the current firmware. I guess the hardware
can support it. Soon as it ever gets announced,
you bet it will be available in Everest.

Apparently, some of the filter parameters are programmable,
but only via the DOS editor. (don't get excited. by
programmable, I mean if you know how to program the MA-1 machine language
via hex bytes, i.e. rewrite the firmware!)

-Mark

Please tell AVM about the problem. Do you have the latest drivers from
the AVM web site? The drivers that ship on the CDROM
are known to do this.

The DOS editor doesn't use sysex messages to communicate with the editor (it writes directly
to the ISA bus), while the W95 editors go through the
MIDI sysex streams. There's nothing I can do about it, because
the direct method is undocumented.

-Mark

Do you mean vertical scroll bar that scrolls the layers up/down, or the
horizontal scroll bar that scrolls the keys left/right?

i'll look into this.

-Mark

This is a copy of a post I sent to the Apex discussion board detailing how to get a multi-client system set up with the Apex (sort of !).

This message details my recent quest to get the Apex working as a multi-client system. For those who don't know what I'm on about, basically I wanted to be able to have Everest and a sequencer (Cubase in my case) running at the same time with access to all the functions in each program. This cannot be done using the current Apex Wavetable drivers since they are single-client (can only be used by one program at once).

The easiest way I thought was to use Hubi's Midi Loopback device connected to the Wavetable driver. However, although this works for most things, (including adjustment of sample parameters) it is not possible to download samples to the Apex using it. This is annoying as every time you want to add a new sample you have to shutdown the sequencer, reset the Wavetable drivers in Everest, download the sample and finally reload the sequencer. If you work like me and only think of new samples as a track progresses this becomes very annoying.

After taking a closer look at the actual Wavetable driver I thought of another solution. Basically, whatever AVM tell you (and they told me otherwise), the Wavetable driver is basically just the standard Microsoft MPU-401 driver. All they have done is recompiled it or even just hacked it and changed the name from 'Roland MPU-401' to 'Apex Wavetable'. This lead me to thinking that if I could get a standard multi-client MPU-401 driver that I could use that instead. I got one from PG Music at http://www.pgmusic.com/mpu401.htm (If anyone knows of any others please let me know).

However, this is not the end of the story as inevitably it didn't work straight away. I tried to get rid of the normal Apex driver and install the PG Music one instead. However, this didn't work as the new driver didn't recognise the Apex card. The only I could find way to get it to work is to install the PG driver while still keeping the Wavetable driver and set the base address and irq in the PG driver to the same as the standard driver. This I thought would cause problems but it doesn't seem to. I think the reason you have to keep the original drivers in place is something to do with the fact that the PG driver is not a true Windows 95 driver - I don't really know !

Anyway once this was done, I tried it out with the Media Rack. Everything seemed to work fine. MIDI files played fine through the MA/1 using the new driver. I then tried using Everest. No joy !! Everest couldn't find the MA/1 synth for some reason. What is this wierdness about the Apex system exclusive messages ? Why does it seem to work with the Microsoft standard MPU driver but with nothing else ???

Anyway to stop a long story from getting any longer, bascially as you have got both drivers installed as the same time you can set Everest to use the standard 'Apex Wavetable' driver and your sequencer, midi player etc. to use the PG multi-client driver. This works absolutely fine and means that you can have as many programs as you want using the Apex synth at the same time as long as you only have one program (there is only one - Everest) that needs to download stuff to the Apex.

This may seem messy, bu actually once its set up it works really well and needs no additional configuration. One word of warning - stop your sequence playing before you download a new sample otherwise it will be corrupted by MIDI data coming from the other driver.

Really all this is necessary beacuse of AVM's apparent inability to produce a proper multi-client driver for the Apex. I really don't think its that hard especially as it is largely based on a standard MPU driver and you just need to interleave the MIDI data. I would have thought that an experienced programmer at AVM could knock one up in less than a week. The Pinnacle has one and that uses the same synth as the Apex !

I hope this helps anyone having the same problems.

Any additional info would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Mark

: I'm such a fan of the Everest editor.

Couldn't agree more!
Why people moan on about the TB editor being crap
(and still in beta!), why not spend the 20 quid
and get a good editor - you've just spent 300 on
the Pinne itself so 20 quid isn't going to break
the bank...

Keep up the good work Mark!
(BTW, can we have a "Autoload" feature to load a
bank at start-up - had to slip a feature request
in the somewhere!)... <g>

Both the external wave editor button and a MUCH better bank editor (with drag and drop)
will be in the next release.