Virtual vs. Reality:

hardware and software wavetable midi synthesizers

including a comparison of Yamaha Soft Synthesizer with Roland Virtual Sound
Canvas

I. OVERVIEW

Wavetable music synthesis has been the high-end alternative to FM
synthesis. FM synthesis first appeared in pc's in the second half of the
1980's on the Adlib music card, and in more advanced (and expensive) form
on the IBM Music Feature card. Wavetable synthesis addon's for computers is
slightly more recent and has been dominated by the same hardware companies
that have been the major players in the manufacture of electronic music
keyboards for musicians: Roland, Yamaha, Ensoniq and Emu. The latter was
acquired by Creative Labs, a Singapore based PC card manufacutrer best
known for its SoundBlaster soundcards, when Creative added wavetable
capabilities to some of their cards.

These companies, led by Roland, have made a variety of pc cards and
external modules intended to add high quality wavetable music to personal
computers. Roland pioneered with the MPU-401 midi port to link pc's with
the world of midi instuments, and supported personal computer midi with a
series of high quality midi modules and cards, including the CM series of
external midi tone systhesis modules intended to be used with computers.
Roland also made the LAPC-1 synthesizer on a card (very similar to an MT32
synthesizer, or D series keyboards). This synthesis technique used a hybrid
of wavetable and digital oscillator synthesis. And in 1991 they introduced
both the original SC-55 Sound Canvas, and at the end of the year, the Sound
Canvas on a pc card, the SCC1.

Yamaha, on the other hand, has dominated the FM synthesis chip market,
making the FM synthesis chips for IBM, Adlib, Creative Labs, MediaVision,
and other soundcard makers. More recently, they have introduced external
wavetable modules, wavetable chip sets, and very recently their own
wavetable cards and "daughterboards", designed to mount on the side of
connector equipped pc sound cards, to add wavetable midi.

1996 however brings an interesting twist. Two of the major hardware makers
have finally produced entirely software wavetable midi synthesizers.
Yamaha's "Soft Synthesizer" technology has appeared in a Karoake product
not sold in the U..S., and most recently in it's "MidPlug" midi plugin for
Netscape Corportation's Netscape line of WWW browsers. These plugin is in
downloadable Beta release. Yamaha says MidPlug uses its AWM synthesizer
technology, as featured in many of its hardware products.

At the same time, Roland has an unreleased product called Virtual Sound
Canvas. Unlike Yamaha's Soft Synthesizer technology, the Virtual Sound
Canvas is not a plugin or embedded in a karaoke product, it is a
freestanding piece of software that does just what the name says: it
appears to the computer as a midi device, like the hardware soundcards and
midiports that are installed on the system.

Since there is a clear sense in which the hardware synthesizers are virtual
musical instruments, in that they emulate acoustic and electromechanical
instruments entirely electronically, the software wavetable synthesizers
can be seen as virtual virtual musical instruments -- software emulations
of digital electronic hardware that in turn emulates non-digital
instruments. At each step up, the hardware becomes more generic, until it
is a generic WinTel box.

Clearly this development puts the hardware manufacturers in an interesting
situation. They know how to make and sell hardware. Some of them even know
how to make money doing this. And they are secure in that digital wavetable
synthesis hardware is too expensive for a consumer to copy. But now what
happens when their $500 hardware product appears as a software product on a
floppy diskette? Or can be downloaded? How will it be sold, at what price
point, and how will piracy be controlled? At this time, the answers are
blowing in the wind.. Yamaha's approach is to not make the software product
as fully functional as a hardware synth; Roland's approach has been to not
release the product.

These can't be long range solutions. The technological imperataive is
irresistable. Today's processors have the power to do wavetable synthesis
while simultaneously running apps such as midi sequencers or games. Windows
95 handles the multitasking and the gory details of dealing with the DAC on
almost any soundcard. So software synthesis is do-able now. And predictably
competitors to the hardware synth makers are appearing on the scene,
including Intel, and a version of the V-synth included with Turtle Beach's
inexpensive Monte Carlo soundcard. And even shareware and freeware products
are starting to appear, including Timidity, Midinight Express, and others.
It appears that Yamaha and Roland must enter the market, no matter what the
effect on hardware sales, in order to salvage anything from their years of
experience and development.

But how well does this technology work?

II. COMPARATIVE REVIEW

I compared the Yamaha MidPlug synthesizer with Roland's Virtual Sound
Canvas, both running on a Pentium P100 system with 16 meg ram under the
required Windows 95. And I compared both to two hardware wavetable
synthesizers: the Ensoniq Soundscape soundcard, and an external Sound
Canvas (the CM500, with a Sound Canvas section that is equivalent to the
SC55 Sound Canvas module). The CM500 was connected to the Soundscapes midi
out. All 4 were monitored using a home audio system (receiver and 3 way
speakers, 12inch woofers, as well as with headphones).

YAMAHA MIDPLUG SOFT SYNTHESIZER

Yamaha is giving away the MidPlug as a free download from their internet
site in Japan. MidPlug is not a standalone virtual synthesizer; it works
only with Netscape version 2.0 and above. The "YMP00WAV.TBL" file, which I
take to be the wavetable, is 1023 kbytes. In the release I looked at,
Yamaha's installation program installed a Yamaha MIDPLUG line on the
Start/Program menu, but this only has the license agreement and a readme in
it. It did not install the MidPlug in Netscape itself. So I had to do this
later, going through Netscape's inelegant "options", "preferences" etc.
menu hierarchy only to end at a slew of cryptically described MIME file
format types and awkward install procedure. Netscape still doesn't report
MidPlug as the helper application for midi files, but it works. Although I
installed the Beta E version of MidPlug on Aug.10, less than 2 weeks later
MidPlug announced it was going to expire Aug 31 and I would have to
download a new release.

Midplug pops up whenever Netscape downloads a page with an embedded midi
file. It then begins to play the file. The interface is very simple: three
clickable buttons control play, pause and stop (stop followed by play will
restart the current piece at the beginning). To the right of this are two
rows, each with 3 smaller buttons. The top controls tempo, the lower pitch.
The buttons allow the user to bump these playback parameters up, down, or
return to the original setting .

It is also possible to start midi playback without having the MidPlug
interface appear. On their Web pages Yamaha has provided the first
installments of a useful tutorial setting out how to control MidPlug, and
how to embed midifiles in Web pages, as well as how to use frames and other
devices to offer the viewer a selection of files. They also provide several
examples that will show-off Midplug working. There does not seem to be
provision for saving a midifile that MidPlug is playing from a web page.
Perhaps this is an intentional inability.

MidPlug promises to make midi music a common part of web browsing. The
appeal of midi of course is the much smaller amount of data that must be
transmitted compared with the data required for digitzed audio. MidPlug's
sound is quite pleasing, on a par with the Ensoniq Soundscape. MidPlug has
some reverb (not user controllable) that fills in the sound, especially
compared with the Soundscape, which has no effects. However, MidPlug is not
a match for the hardware Sound Canvas. One can use MidPlug to playback midi
files that are not embedded in web pages, indeed any midi file that one has
on one's local system. Just use Netscape's "File Open" command to load a
local midi file and the music starts. Unfortunately, Netscape assumes that
one only want to open html files, so it requires a trip to a pulldown list
and selecting "show all files" to get it to display midi files in the File
Open dialogue box -- and you must do this everytime you go to open a midi
file.

Unfortunately, MidPlug is very senstive to anything else going on in one's
system. It hesitates or skips notes if another program running at the same
time grabs some cpu time, or even if one just opens a window -- at least on
my P100 system. And of course by its very design, MidPlug can be used only
with the Netscape browser, not with games, midi sequencers, or any other
application that would benefit from a virtual synth. Still, as a Netscape
plugin, it is pretty swell, and will have likely have the effect of
popularizing midi in web pages.

ROLAND VIRTUAL SOUND CANVAS

Virtual Sound Canvas is a complete software emulation of a Roland Sound
Canvas, down to the front panel LCD display of the SC module versions that
show a bargraph of the level of each of the 16 General Midi channels. It
also has a minimal built-in sequencer that allows it to load and play a
midifile. This built-in sequencer did not always work correctly (perhaps it
can't handle sysex?)

In addition to the bargraph output, a button on the frontpanel styled
interface switches to a display of cpu usage. The same display also shows
current and maximum polyphony (number of notes that have been played
simultaneously). Among the several settings that one may make is maxiumum
polyphony. Default is 128 (!) These settings are stored in a "vsc.ini" file
in the Windows directory.

Other options include setting the maximum cpu usage (default is 70%). I
never hit 70% during testing, but did reach the upper 60's. Near as I can
tell from the non-English docs, Roland specifies a Pentium 60 minimum. One
can also set whether the priority is top quality or minimal cpu use. Since
I had no serious slowdowns, I kept quality at the default top priority. One
can also switch reverb/chorus on and off (probably affects cpu and memory
use).

The sound is good. It is better than either the MidPlug or the Ensoniq
card. It was not, however, as good as the external SoundCanvas. Since the
main problem was distortion, this may be attributable to the better quality
DACs on the SoundCanvas than on the Soundscape. Also the hardware
SoundCanvas clearly had the best high frequency response, especially
noticeable in percussion. This again is probably attributable to the
Ensoniq, but could be intrinsic to the Virtual Sound Canvas. The file I
take to be the wavetable, "vsc.dat", gets installed in the "windows"
directory (in general, a bad idea), and occupies 1.381 kbytes, about a
third bigger than Yahama's corresponding file. But these numbers may not
tell much, since it is unknown to me if and how these wavetables are
compressed.

The VSC did not sound quite the same as the hardware Sound Canvas. On some
files, it sounded quite different. For example, some time ago Roland
produced a midi file called "DIANA.MID", which is a 60's song with very
effective use of "doo-wah" voices, apparently achieved through clever use
of sysex. It's great on the SC; doesn't work right on the VSC. However the
VSC did not suffer nearly as much from the sensitivity to cpu use as does
MidPlug. Running other programs while VSC played, or using the VSC with a
sequencer or game, was quite workable.

The install was exciting. All of the install dialogue was in Japanese,
which couldn't display on English Win95. Not that I could have read it had
it appeared. The install program puts 4 items under the Virtual Sound
Canvas entry on the Win95 Start/Programs menu: VSC itself, the help file
(can't be read with English Win95), a readme (also Japanese), and an
Uninstaller (not tried). VSC then appears to the system as an installed
midi device. To get it to work with games, one needs to go into Midimapper
and select it as the midi device (on Start menu, go to Settings,
Multimedia, then Midi tab).

Once VSC was installed, it insisted on popping up whenever I loaded a midi
file into Netscape -- despite the fact that it had never been selected as a
helper. On the other hand, if VSC was running and I attempted to start
Netscape, it crashed ("program has performed an illegal operation") -- I am
sure this occurs during Netscape's loading of plugins. These compatibility
problems will need to be worked out.

Both of these virtual synthesizers suffer from a serious lag problem. This
is not a problem where no syncronization is required. But both lag at least
a quarter note behind the midi stream, at least on sequences I tried. No
problem with Midplug, which is just enhancing a web page. A problem with a
true virtual synth replacement. VSC couldn't keep up with the bouncing ball
in Turtle Beach MidiKaraoke. And it was consistently behind the march of
notes in Cakewalks "staff" view. The hardware Sound Canvas had no such
problem.

CONCLUSION

Virtual wavetable synthesizers are inevitable but nevertheless exciting.
They will be great for laptops and for desktop computer users who don't own
wavetable midi hardware. They should also benefit all who enjoy midi by
increasing the popularity of this format. At this time, the Virtual Sound
Canvas is the superior piece of software, both aurally and in flexibility.
Unfortunately, its still a gleam in Roland's eye. Their midi lag makes soft
synths problematic for certain applications. However if the soft synths
become popular, and the lag persists, it can be taken into account by midi
app writers -- as I imagine was done when Yamaha's soft synth was
incorporated into karaoke software. Finally, the sound from soft synths is
at the mercy of the DAC on the soundcard -- an argument for paying more
attention to this aspect of the next soundcard you buy.

The writing is on the wall for the hardware wavetable soundcard -- maybe
for soundcards generally, if motherboard makers integrate DAC's and mixers
on the motherboad.. Intel's forthcoming MMX Pentiums, which build signal
processing features right into the cpu, will make it even easier to code
high performance software synths. Unfortunately for synth makers, the very
popularity of wavetable synthesis will probably kill the mass market for
wavetable pc sound hardware. It will. become software, generic, and
ultimately, I expect, incorporated in operating systems. In fact, maybe
Roland's best bet is to cut a deal with Microsoft soon, to counter Yamaha's
cozying with Netscape, and to get their synth technology into every Windows
box. But for now, the technology is new, evolving, and impressive. These
are exciting times for amateur musicians and computer hobbyists, as the new
Virtual Synthesizer software promises to bring the cost of good quality
wavetable midi music down for computer owners.

_________________

MidPlug and Soft Synthesizer, Sound Canvas and Virtual SoundCanvas, IBM and
IBM Music Feature, Adlib, Windows95 are registered trademarks of Yamaha,
Roland, IBM, Adlib and Microsoft corporations respectively.

Copyright David Cole. Reprint and publication permission inquiries to
dcole@d.umn.edu
.