source file: m1587.txt
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1998 15:58:13 +0100

Subject: soundcards

From: Manuel.Op.de.Coul@ezh.nl

Carl Lumma wrote:
>At first I thought about the Turtle Beach Montego, but after reading
>Manuel's post I said, "No Way!".  It seems the only other board to offer
>Soundblaster compatibility is the Soundblaster Live, but I swore I'd never
>buy another Creative product.  But is the Live actually a decent card?
>Does anybody have one?

I'm not saying that this one shouldn't be bought perse. The number of
soundcards with drivers that support the Midi Tuning Standard is very
limited. There are also hardware features to consider.
But the Turtle Beach Midi file player that came with the card also plays my
pitchbended files incorrectly. That's not a drama since there are plenty of
other Midi file players. Although the user interface looks nice. So don't
use
it with Midi files made with Scala.
The drivers for the Montego card were written by the company that made the
audio
chip, Aureal. I wrote them an e-mail twice to ask for tuning support but
there
was no answer.

You can even have real-time synthesis by the CPU. I have just downloaded
Yamaha's S-YXG50 player. It needs MMX. Go to http://www.yamaha-xg.com/ and
follow the links to MIDPLUG and S-YXG50.
This also doesn't support the Midi Tuning Standard alas, but you can use
12-tone tunings with -64/+63 cents deviation from equal tempered in steps
of
1 cent. It's compatible with other Yamaha XG and Roland GS synthesizers.
Moreover it has 16 parts with each a different tuning table so you can use
16 instruments all with different 12-tone tuning, or 8 with different
24-tone
tuning, etc. So it's to be preferred over the pitchbend approach.
I'm looking into providing support in Scala for this synthesizer type.

Manuel Op de Coul    coul@ezh.nl