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Our Sound Clips are under construction, but new ones are added often. You will be able to click on links to these clips when viewing the Sound Card Voice Listings and the Sample CD pages. You may check the Latest News page to see if clips have been added for your synth yet, or else just go directly to that page.
If for some reason this sound or any other sounds on this site do not play in your system, drop us some feedback and let us know what brand of browser you are using and which sounds did not play.
Check out our Audio Sound Tools page for links to applications which support the AU format that you may download.
Most of the Sound Clips here are in SUN-AU format which is currently the most widely supported sound download format for Web browsers. The older Netscape application used for sound support is naplayer.exe and is fully setup to play sounds when Netscape is installed. The clips are originally sampled at 44khz/16bit on a Digidesign Audiomedia II system directly from the synth. They are then transferred to the PC and converted into the appropriate format to accommodate the timbre of that particular sound. They are converted to one of the following sample rates based on the size and timbre of that particular instrument - 44khz / 32khz / 22khz / 16khz & 11khz in either 16bit linear or 8bit uLaw format. The Netscape naplayer supports these. If your web browser MIME does not support the AU format we recommend that you download an appropriate sample player which does, because, by using the 22khz 8bit uLaw format you are able to hear a sound which is very close to the original (minus a bit of high frequencies) which is 1/4 of the original file size.
We have made the sound clips as short as possible, so that you will not have to wait forever to audition our sounds. We try to keep the sound card clip file sizes ranging from 30k to 200k, which, on a good day, and with a 28.8k modem, should only take about 10 to 60 seconds to reach you. Because these clips are small, they will pass your ears rather quickly. The idea is that once the sound has been transferred to your drive cache, you can click on the sound repeatedly to evaluate the clip. One drawback to clicking on the same link repeatedly is that your temporary (temp) directory (for PC's) will get loaded up rather fast and you may run out of drive space until you quite Netscape and reload it again. A workaround to this involves quick mouse moves! You need to catch the naplayer while it's on screen and hold it there by clicking on its stop button while the sound is still playing. For very small sounds this can become quite a challenge. We have contacted Netscape already about this anomaly, but it wouldn't hurt for them to hear your feedback as well!
We will also be providing you with demo clips from our sampling CD's. These will need to be larger, but great effort is going into the production so that you will be able to hear the meat and potatoes of the CD's, without having to wait for the fluff! So, we are including several formats for those, including quick-downloading Real Audio clips, as well as the AU clips.
Our cards are generally arranged so that you get a full range of sounds out of each card. Our technical specification for our sound programmers contains a general ordering criteria for locations of different types of sounds so that the end user will be easily able to locate a particular type of sound i.e. piano, string, wind, synth, percussive and special effect in roughly the same area between different cards. The clips are chosen to give you an idea of the gamut of the card and are by no means merely showing off the best sounds. Due to limitations in both time and hard drive space we are unable to provide samples of all the sounds, but the selections chosen should help you in finding a card for your purposes. Also, some names can be rather creative in order to communicate the nature of a wild or ethereal synth patch, so some of those are supplied as well.
Better! The nature of the uLaw compression scheme is that it does introduce some distortion (fuzziness and grunge). The fact that most of these sounds are converted from 44khz down to 22khz or more, as well, means that there will be a loss of high frequencies between 10khz and 20khz. So, essentially, when you get these sounds home on your own synth, they will sound both cleaner and brighter. Also, most of the synth sounds here are monophonic to keep the file sizes down, but most of the actual patches and samples are programmed to playback in stereo on your synth or sampler which enhances the sound that much more. If you are just trying these sounds out to get an idea of what a particular synthesizer can do...keep this in mind also... They can all sound better. What we wanted to do here is to give you a good idea of what the instrument patch can do for your synth and creativity!
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Home | Gallery | SynthCards | CD's | Midi | Catalog | Dealers | Orders |
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News | Guestbook | Multimedia | Classifieds | Sites | feedback |