PS 02 Palmtop Studio

  • Thread starter Thread starter Vease
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Vease

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Is anybody using this device apart from me? I think this is one of the best designed entry level pieces of recording gear I have ever seen. The learning curve is about one hour to get a basic drums, bass,guitar and vocal recording, and maybe a couple of hours to get to grips with the bounce,punch-in/out and mixdown features.

It also features a ton of useable, if not brilliant,effects patches with the usual proviso that the various modelled distortion effects are nowhere up to the standard of the originals.

The BIG problem for anyone wanting to use this device for 'professional' quality home recording is that sound files are stored on a Smart Media card in a format that cannot be easily converted into something that can be burnt onto a CD. Also you need to shell out big bucks for a 64Mb card in order to have enough memory to record a few songs. So, you also need to buy a Smart Media card reader to copy your song files to a folder on a PC, then you can wipe those files from the card and start recording new stuff.

If anyone has managed to transfer songs from the PS 02 onto CD I would love to hear about how you did it, as I am having a tough time getting the Rhythm(backing) Tracks recorded.
 
Hi, Vease,

I just ordered one myself. Apparently there is a new beta program that allows one to save the files as .wav and MIDI via the smartmedia card reader.

You might want to check out the user reviews at Harmony Central (www.harmonycentral.com).

Another exciting development is the soon to be released Zoom RT-323 which apparently will allow us to program in our own drum programs.

I'm looking forward to trying it out, although I am going to invest in a serious digital multitrack as well - I have a US-428, but really miss my portastudios.

Best Regards,
 
I downloaded the Card Manager from the Zoom site, and the problem is that the Audio Tracks are converted to.wav,while the rhythm tracks are converted to SMF format, and I don't have the software to mix or edit midi files - bummer!
 
Well, surely the software to convert can't be all that expensive. I don't know about .smf format, but there are very inexpensive midi/audio track sequencer/editors available - even StudioTracks(?) from Cakewalk will probably work just fine.

My wish list for the PS-02 is that it record at 44.1Khz and that it include MIDI. But for $330 it looks like it will be very useful - (I can always play the audio into my US-428, sampling at 24bit 44khz, and manually align it with my MIDI tracks.

I doubt that the PS-02 will be my recorder of choice for CD production, but it sure looks like a great idea for a quick and dirty field recording device.
 
BuleriaChk, you don't realise how technically challenged I am :-) I just wanted to get the songs onto my PC and burn them straight onto CD, but the rhythm tracks being in SMF means I can't do that - unless you know different!
 
Well, if that's all you need, just record them from the headphone jack or output to the pc via your sound card and then use Adaptec's Easy CD creator. (That is, record both drum tracks and audio together as a wav file, bypassing Zoom's software)

(As for my previous post, come to think of it......, duh!)
Obviously, SMF files are not MIDI files, so I'll have to wait until I get the PS-02 to figure it out. They may be Zoom proprietary, as way of getting rhythm files from the RT-323 to the PC and back. I believe the rhythm samples in the PS-02 are pcm files, so have to be handled differently from MIDI.

I don't know how, but it is one of the first things I'm going to check out. (Their new RT-323 drum machine (with a smartmedia card) is probably their solution from getting from the PS-02 to MIDI, but I'm not exacly sure how it works....)

Best Regards,

Chuck
 
Oops, I meant pcm samples, not files. It is a new product, and I imagine (hope) there will be additional software showing up on Zoom's site shortly.....
 
Well, I checked their help file, and apparently "smf" means "standard midi files". If so, they should have a file extension of ".mid".

That means you can import them into a sequencer, and drive a drum machine - either the one on the sound card in your computer, or a stand-alone drum machine.

A .mid file is not actually notes; it is just timing and control info. To hear the sounds, it will have to key a drum machine or its midi equivalent.

Chuck
 
Sorry, I should have pointed out that SMF is a Standard Midi Format. I asked at my local music store about this problem and they said - check out the Internet! I think they meant that there may be some freeware or shareware programs out here that don't do much except convert midi files to Wav - which is all I want.
 
The problem is in the concept of converting midi files to wav. Midi is timing information; it doesn't include the actual instrument voices. Midi files are used to trigger instrument voices in other devices - sound cards which contain .pcm sounds, drum machines, synthesizers, etc.

What one does is set up a sound card or drum machine to use a specific midi port and channel, and then run sequencer software (usually a basic one comes with your computer; eg. Cakewalk LE, or Digital Orchestrator Pro, or similar.

So you would open a .mid file created by the PS-02 software with your sequencer program, and the pattern should appear in a track.
 
En fin, you play the sequencer program, which will drive your sound card internally or an external drum machine.

The sounds will come out of the drum machine or the audio output of the sound card, where they can be recorded at the computer inputs as audio files. (Or to an external tape recorder. The sounds are then .wav file which can be recorded to a CD.
 
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