Re: Desktop Loopaz (AWE 64 Upgrade cost)

["Steve Lauder" <steve.lauder@elspa.com>]

SORRY - RESEND.       My Crap grammar in the first posting meant some parts
didn't make sense (well, not to me anyway!)

>>> If you don't mind my asking, what did you pay and where did you get the
ram? <<<

Bearing in mind you only own the value, you will only be able to up the RAM
to 24.5mb (AWE64 Gold has 4mb on the card already as opposed to 512k).  
Look
on the Creative Labs European Web Site (www.creaf.com) and you'll see that
it costs £125.00 sterling.  Not exactly cheap compared to 72 pin simms, but
what can you do about it!

>>> BTW, how have you been mapping the samples to your midi keyboard? <<<

Well, that's why I bought the RAM.  I don't know whether it comes bundled
with the value pack or not, but I got Vienna 2.1 with my Gold card.  Vienna
2.1 is a soundfont editor which, (funnily enough) allows you to build sound
font banks.  It allows you to map several samples (depending on the amount
of memory on the card) to the keyboard and use them on the same instrument
patch.  You can also play around with envelopes and LFOs in Vienna, and
sometimes you can use these facilities to make a good sample sound
fantastic!

Sampling at 16bit  Stereo 44.1khz you can get approx. 2.4 minutes worth of
samples onto the soundcards' RAM with a 24mb setup, which I'm sure you'll
find to be quite sufficient.  The real bonus with this amount of RAM is 
that
you can have 32 or 64 samples (processor dependent) playing at the time.  
If
you're running a pretty average spec PC like myself, that's definitely more
than the number of audio tracks
available to you in a sequencer.

I can't believe you can't buy bigger than an 8mb AWE64 memory upgrade in 
Oz!
If you really can't get one and you want one, mail me off-list and we'll 
see
what we can arrange.

Regards,

Steve Lauder
steve.lauder@elspa.com