A full and exhausting day. Started by testing the DD discs sent to me by Bruce, these worked in the synth - an amazingly uplifting moment, after trying for months to get this working. I need 7 discs, but only have two, this amounts to data for 14 tracks. I have 44 to record (plus alternative edits). I recorded a test track, Haunted, which is a dark and simple track, very like the incidental music to Arcangel. It might even be in the Arcangel soundtrack, I can't remember; a few tracks have been renamed.
After this test, I transmitted the System Exclusive data to OctaMED, but sending it back didn't work, it wouldn't send. I paused things and got to work programming an update to my workstation Prometheus. The first main job was to upgrade the rendering window. It used to look like this:
It now looks like this:
Samples have to be checked for clipping (exceeding 1.0 or -1.0) anyway, so it's not a loss of speed to count these (because 99% of samples don't) so I thought I'd add some stats about clipped samples. I've also added the song length in samples, and the date/time of the render, which might be useful. You'll note that there are 6 channels (left, right, front, back, up, down).
I also added a few minor checks and efficiencies here and there. My updates now are typically bug fixes or ideas to make existing things better, rather than adding features.
Then, back to the SY-85. I downloaded a program called MIDI-OX and used that to capture the System Exclusive messages, this worked for sending too, so this is a genuine replacement for the disc drive (though I'll keep the discs anyway, and will probably never need them or compose anything for this synth again).
I recorded 6 more tracks but everything took longer than hoped. The volume levels vary on each one, and MED can sometimes pause for half a second, forcing me to stop, delete, and replay the track from the start. My Lexicon sound card also has a fault which makes it whine when anything is plugged into the USB ports - well, maybe not anything, but certainly when a MIDI cable is. I've traced this to its USB connection; actually wobbling it makes the whine louder or quieter. Removing the MIDI from the USB stops it completely, but that's not an option here.
There are several tracks which mix samples and synth. These will be more difficult than expected to record because the synth's volume levels appear to be different for each track, so will mean manual mixing by ear - not difficult, I'll use a mixer, but time consuming.
I'll probably not release this music for years, if at all. It consists of The Arcangel Soundtrack (ok, that IS released), the first version of Synaesthesia, some game music which was never used like the Archetypes theme from Arcangel, some music for a Bouderdash clone I never made, the music to two early PC games Roton (I wrote two very different Roton themes) and Martian Rover Patrol, plus a Mission Impossible remix, and (many) more, including some remakes of even earlier music as used on the Genesis album.
