DSoundTool 1.11 released

[Deve Loper]

Hi. Must be something weird with your wav files you dropped. Depending on the loudest layer abs level, all layers get amplified so the loudest layer is normalized. So orig -5 -9 -13 will become 0 -4 -8.
Test with the birch sounds on our web.
Before dropping files you need not normalize any of them.
Deve.

[Manfred]

Hi Deve,

thanks for the explanation. I will try with the Birch files on your web page.


@Louis

no problem at all since i know now how to prepare the wav files 

But i have another question: When opening a DSND file and klick on one of the zones i get a table with information about each layer. Can you please tell me what the range for the values "Velocity" and "Max volume" is.

For velocity i thought it is 0 to 360 as described in the "Advanced topics" of your online documentation. But i opened a sound file which i created with SD2.0 samples and i saw a negative velocity value:





I can't imagine what a negative velocity is. Is there an explanation or is it a bug?

Second question is the range for the volume. Looking at at the values of several files the maximum seems to be 32768. That looks like 16bit including 1 bit for sign. Is this always the range for the volume no matter if i use 16bit or 24bit samples to create the sounds?

Thanks for your help,

Manfred

[Louis]

But i have another question: When opening a DSND file and klick on one of the zones i get a table with information about each layer. Can you please tell me what the range for the values "Velocity" and "Max volume" is.

For velocity i thought it is 0 to 360 as described in the "Advanced topics" of your online documentation. But i opened a sound file which i created with SD2.0 samples and i saw a negative velocity value:

I can't imagine what a negative velocity is. Is there an explanation or is it a bug?

Second question is the range for the volume. Looking at at the values of several files the maximum seems to be 32768. That looks like 16bit including 1 bit for sign. Is this always the range for the volume no matter if i use 16bit or 24bit samples to create the sounds?

Question 1: when I reversed-engineered the dsnd file format I did not know exactly how to interpret the velocity values. Since I could only find samples within a range of 360 I took 360 as maximum and 0 as minimum. But I should have used 511 as maximum. In order to preserve backward compatibility, I extended the range to -151 ... 360, but I forgot to update the manual. Very soft hits can have negative velocities.

Question 2: yes, DSoundTool normalizes volumes to 16-bit values, so 32768 (= abs(-32768) for binary number afficionados) is the maximum even for 24-bit samples.

[Manfred]

Hi Louis,

thanks for your reply! Interesting to see that a lot of factory sounds are using mostly the upper half of the velocity range. At least the files i opened have very few layers with velocities below 100. But while drumming the played volume of the samples is a function of the trigger inputs. By the way the AD-Converters at the trigger inputs (ADC78H90) have a resolution of 12 bit.

I hope i'm not bothering you but i have another question regarding the naming of zones when opening a DSND file. As example a screenshot of the hihat file Swiss Med12:



So the zones are named by the zone number (3, 8 and 9) followed by the description. Is the description just a description stored in the file or does it mean anything? I'm asking because the bow sounds have "closed", "10", "35" and "95" in its name. But i read somewhere that the distribution between closed and open is uniform just depending on the number of halfopen levels.

At the Groove15 hihat there is a zone called "Zone 8: bow 25 open". But zone 8 is edge. Thats why i guess it is just a description.

Regards, Manfred

PS. And the mapping of the zones obviously has changed since the last OS update. At my kit the bow of the hihat is now displayed as zone 4 and not 3 anymore. And the heads of snare and toms are now zone 1....

[Louis]

Hi Manfred,

I forgot to mention: you can consider the velocity as a logarithmic number; for example the difference between velocity 0 and 100 is very small, but the difference between 260 and 360 is huge.

Regarding the names of the zones: you are right, the zone number is the (OS 1.1 based) zone number. The description is stored in the dsnd file, and is obviously not always correct, but it has no impact whatsoever on how the sounds are played. Only the zone number and (for hihat) the order in which the zones are listed is of importance.

I also noticed that the zone numbers have changed in OS 1.20. I don't know why.

Best regards,

Louis

[Manfred]

Hi,

thanks again for the explanation. Regarding the order of the hihat sounds the "Swiss SE 14" seems to be a kind of misfit. There it starts with foot splashes whereas the other files have foot splashes at the end of the file.

Best Regards,

Manfred

PS. No more questions for today 

[dancebander]

Hi!
Why is DSoundtool piching up the dsnd files when the files have been split?

 
Best Regards
dancebander