[sdiy] a stupid question

[matti]

On Mon, 22 Jul 2002, hexor wrote:

> i know it's a stupid question, but i have this little doubt and since i
> still haven't studied signal theory and other stuff like that i can't
> solve it. a friend of mine is into electronic music so he knows
> alot about software synths and music making programs, altough he has
> little or no knowledge about maths or electronics. a few days ago he was
> explaining me that his favourite program, called reason, stores every
> single note for every single instruments. so i said "what a waste of
*snip*

Some software uses wavetables for its oscillators; there is stored in
memory one cycle of a waveform which is played back, stretched or shrunk
in length. if a file of, say, a filter sweep is played back at a speed
other than that at which it was recorded, the speed at which the filter is
swept is changed, too.

Other software computes oscillators on the fly. Neither method is
necessarily better, but using wavetables means using fewer clock cycles.
In either case, there is definitely some realtime processing of data going
on at the amplifiers, filters, and so on, even the wavetable oscillators
if you want to think of them in that way. No way no how (if I understand
you correctly) does reason store every single sound possible in an
ensemble in memory. Reason is 32 bit software, that means there are 2^32
different frequencies to be played. You're right, that's a lot of memory.

enjoy


-
"Do you know the whole story?"
"No"
"Well, if you know the whole story, you might trip, but you gotta trip to
know the whole story"