soundcard tone generattor?

[banjoal]

I hope some kind person can help me with my problem.I recently bought a audiophile 2496 sound card. With every soundcard I ever had before I could play a midi file through my audio out into my amp and get sound through my speakers but with the 2496 I can`t hear midi files.I contacted midiman support and after a week I got a one line reply that went "you need a tone generator" Can someone please help me figure this out . What I want to do is take a computer generated midi bass line from cakewalk or biab and record it through my amp to my vs1680 in audio form.If it will help I should mention that I can`t hear a midi sound even out of the simple midi players on my computer.If any one colld shed some light on this I`d be very grateful. thanks Al

 

[vox]

Consumer soundcards like the soundblaster serve multiple functions, they have a basic crappy sounding mic input and preamp, they have a basic line level input with crappy converters, they have a joystick port which can double as a MIDI output and they have a usually cheesy sounding 'Tone Generator' or 'sound module'. This is the part of the soundcard that produces the sounds that MIDI files use when playing back, it contains low resolution versions of drum sounds, strings, horns, bass etc. It is basically a trimmed down set of sounds that you would usually get from a keyboard.
What happened is this, basically it is taken for granted that anyone who is recording music (not just playing games) will usually find these sounds substandard and unusable, so when you buy a Pro or SemiPro sound card the 'Tone Generator' is left out, you can get Pro cards with Midi, Mic pres and of course line ins, but there aren't any (that I can think of) with built in sounds. For recording purposes you generally get your sounds from 'real' instuments or from a keyboard or sound module.

What you will need to do is use the Soundblaster for tones and the Audiophile for recording audio, both cards should coexist without problems.

 

[banjoal]

thanks for the reply Vox,I`m pretty new to all this and I appreciate your time,are you saying that a person with a pro sound card could record midi into a computer but in order to listen to this recording on an amp and speakers they would have to use their crappy commercial card.If so Is there a software program that could work as a tone generator,the problem for me is that I would like to record converted midi to audio sounds into my hard disk recorder and I would like to use my amp.I think the original cheap soundcard that came with my computer has an out for computer speakers only .Thanks again Al

 

[vox]

Actually one of the exceptions to what I stated above is that some Soundblaster cards have the ability to use soundfonts, what this means is that the card will let you load high quality sampled sounds into memory and then let you play them back via MIDI.

The way I think most people in your situation handle it is to connect the monitors to the pro card, and connect the consumer card's output to the pro card's input, that way you can record the MIDI sounds as audio.

 

[drstawl]

>If so Is there a software program that could work as a tone generator,

Yes indeed. The Virtual Sound Canvas will emulate the famous Roland Module and the MIDI controlled sounds will come out of your better soundcard much like the playback of .wav files.

The downside of this:

It won't sound as good as a real synth module.
It's a pretty large computer resource hog.

The upside:

It sounds better than the built in MIDI synths on most crappy cards.
It's ~$30. At least that's what I paid.

 

[banjoal]

I would like to thank you guys for being so helpful,I had an old version of a soft synth sitting in my pile of stuff so I loaded it up and now I have midi sounds through my monitors.I will be shopping for a better synth but thanks to you guys this is one less recording puzzle I have to deal with.your the greatest and so is this forum. Al