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The Program Setup

OK, you have the SynC Modular running. Now what?

We assume that you have a sound card capable of playing back audio and a MIDI keyboard connected to your computer. If you do not have them you probably have to add some equipment to your studio.

Now back to the subject. Before you get to work you have to tell the program which MIDI and audio devices it should use. Let's start with MIDI since MIDI setup is simpler.

First you have to know on which MIDI channel your MIDI keyboard transmits data (as you play the keys). Generally you would set it to channel 1. However you can set it to any other channel if you don't like the channel 1. Consult your keyboard manual for detail.

When you are done with the keyboard, switch back to the program. From main window menu bar select Edit->Ensemble Part and set the same MIDI channel as transmitted by your keyboard.

The ensemble part channel setting is actually not a setup setting, but rather an ensemble property. You need to check this setting each time you start a new ensemble project.

Now from the same menu bar select Sound->MIDI Setup. A number of available MIDI inputs will appear in a dialog box on the screen. Select the MIDI input to which your keyboard is connected and press OK. If you use Microsoft Windows, have just an ordinary soundcard (not a pro or semi-pro) and use its game port for MIDI connection, your MIDI input probably bears 'MPU-401' in its name. Otherwise consult your card's manual. For BeOS your MIDI input probably looks as something like this: '/dev/midi/chipname/1'.

That's all with MIDI. Let's skip to audio. Select Sound->Audio Setup from the menu bar. Select the wave output device by clicking its name with left mouse button. Under Windows there are MME and DX (DirectX devices). Hardware-accelerated DirectX devices usually give better latency, and also they give you a better (to 1 millisecond) MIDI timing resolution. Under BeOS you have the following choices - Default output which is the basic sound output service, and two low-level choices - Audio mixer which is basically the same as Default output and External connection which allows you to manually connect SynC Modular to some other audio consumer (using e.g. Cortex app). If you have a registered version it's recommended to use low-level outputs, because they feature better MIDI timing at least.

To the right will be listed a set of sampling rates available for the selected device. Select a sampling rate that you want. If you don't know which rate to select, select 44.1kHz (the sampling rate used in audio CDs). Under BeOS certain sampling rates may produce distorted sound or deny to run, depending on the audio device. Usually 44.1kHz works fine.

Under Windows you have also to select the Resolution and Latency. A good initial choice is resolution of 5 ms and latency of 20 ms. The less the better, but too small values will lead to audio clicks. Too small resolution may also lead to CPU overload. You will define the optimal values later, when you create your first sound with SynC Modular. So just press OK and you are done with audio setup.

Under BeOS you may select number of audio buffers and buffer size, if you are using low-level audio output. Increasing number of buffers is useful if you experience gaps in output audio. Tweaking buffer size is generally not recommended, better leave it set to * (star) which denotes buffer size suggested by the output device.

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