Re: Creamware Scope - computer based looping?

[Paolo Valladolid <pvallado@waynesworld.ucsd.edu>]

I've been following the news on SCOPE and Kyma with great interest.
As mentioned by others, they are competing products that offer integrated
synthesis, sampling, processing, recording, etc. in a single environment
that runs on DSPs so that the host processor is not overloaded.
 
The relevant URLs are

SCOPE
http://www.creamware.com/Seiten/scope/clframe_scope_scope0.htm

Kyma
http://www.symbolicsound.com/

Based on what I have seen so far, these are my comparison takes:

SCOPE Pros:

- Will run on faster processors than the Motorola 56002 DSPs used in the
Capybara, the box which does the real work for Kyma.

- Supports physical modeling

- External controller consisting of a touch-sensitive screen and 20 knobs.
If this controller will talk to the system directly (not through MIDI),
this sounds intriguing.  The problem with adjusting parameters through MIDI
is that most parameters have 127 possible values (in fact, I think fine 
pitch 
bend, which is a two-byte value, is the only MIDI controller value with 
more
than 127 steps).

Kyma Pros:

- A more mature system. Which means it will probably be a lot more stable,
bug-free, etc. than SCOPE when SCOPE debuts. 

- Hardware sits in a separate, rack-mountable box instead of in a card
that sits in your computer.  I think this is a consideration for live
gigging; a laptop/rackmounted Capybara combo is a far more road-worthy 
setup
than a desktop PC/Mac + monitor.  

I know there are companies out there that sell rack-mountable PC cases for
industrial use.  Getting one of these and moving your PC's innards into it
may solve one problem for gigging, but you still have to deal with that
monitor.  I think there are LCD color monitors out there but they may be
quite pricey.

The rising popularity of software synths, software effects/signal 
processing
packages, etc. is interesting, but not much has been done yet in the way
of developing a gig-worthy hardware platform for running these things, with
the notable exception of the Capybara, which only runs the proprietary 
software
(you can't run Seer Systems' Reality or something like that on it).

Cheers,
Paolo