Awave Studio 10.6 Keygen
Gualberto Estrada
I have always used SB-PCI and SB-Live soundcards. Their midi output for legacy DOS is very compatible, and 'acceptable' in quality. I am quite content with it, also because they work fine for modern games as well.
The legacy midi output could easily be improved: by using a better quality ECW wavetable file. Yet there are only 4 of them: 2,4,8 MB and a more obscure 3MB one.
The article says: "The ".ecw" file format was never made open as had been hoped for by enthusiasts." and I would certainly agree with that, was it not for the ecw specification someone seems to have put on this website:
(search 'ecw')
It seems to have been available at least since march 2005...
And indeed, at a first look it seems to be what I hoped it to be!
Now just for someone to include ecw output in some sort of wavetable converter, and legacy midi for all these SBPCI and LIVE cards can be in any quality we want! Or am I wrong here?
anyone know such a converter? (Awave studio still doesn't list ecw as a usable format) Any other ideas?
Interesting - particularly given the the response I got to my specific query about the format back in 2003 (see this thread for details). Makes me wonder who "earwaxcandle" is and how they came by this information...
In that reply you got from creative in 2003: Ain't it a bit odd that ensoniq did not have the rights to make an editor or release the format. They programmed a very impressive software emulator and then made it all dependable on a format that they can't use how they see fit.... it is either not true or it is stupid. IMHO
One thing that is not really clear to me is that the $120 awave studio licence, probably aimed add midi composers, is not a very attractive price if all you want to do is a single conversion of a quality soundfont/dls to a new ecw. Although it might make me a popular guy if I share it ?
AudioPCI was definitely a disappointment for MIDI quality. I "upgraded" to one from a Ensoniq Soundscape and it didn't sound better in my DOS games. Even the 8 MB set is not very good. It took a while for them to get the 8 MB set out, so I'd imagine they were having problems getting better quality out of it.
The older Soundscape cards use 2 MB ROMs and have a real hardware synth + CPU. Elite has a very nice DSP daughtercard that is very flexible (buggy software toolkit tho). They were obviously much more costly to build. AudioPCI was, on the other hand, absolutely built to be cheap. A last ditch effort to save the company, IMO, with super high volume by appeasing OEM PC makers. AudioPCI sure did sell, but it didn't make much money apparently. Creative obviously liked the thing alot though and used it in many other cards for years.
That is an interesting article indeed. Thanks for the link!
Must add that quite soon after my initial post I started to get me some recommended midi hardware, and with that became aware that things like the audio PCI would never be satisfying ever again...
At that time I also encountered my first motherboard that did not support the 'NMI hack' that the Audio-PCI drivers use for DOS compatibility (asus A7V600).
Which made it clear that it is not such a reliable method as I thought it to be.