What is Sound Designer?

Suave Manipulation 

Sound Designer provides sophisticated manipulation of digital audio samples. Like Blank Software’s Sound Lab (see Reviews, Macworld, July 1987), Sound Designer takes sampled sounds and lets you graphically display, reverse, edit, and loop them. Sound Designer’s capabilities, however, extend beyond those of Sound Lab, and it is available for six sampling keyboards. The different versions of Sound Designer share a standardized fle format that allows exchange of sound files. Thus the owner of a Prophet 2000 can take advantage of sounds sampled with an Emu Systems E-Max by simply taking E-Max Sound Designer files and downloading them using Sound Designer for the Prophet 2000. Samples stored in 16-bit format are downloaded to correspond to the sampler’s resolution (usually 8 or 12 bits). Although the sampler’s analog processing of sounds is not transferred from machine to machine, loop points are kept intact, which means you don't have to redo the sustain loop. The only problem with this process is that sounds sampled at one pitch cannot be combined with a sample at another pitch to create a unison. 

Sound Designer’s main strength lies in the five digital mixer modules, which provide digital mixing, equalization, and other features unique for a computer keyboard system under $85,000. The Mix module allows two sounds to be mixed in any proportion (for example, 40 percent flute to 60 percent muted trashcans, 20 percent kettle drum to 80 percent car crash). Mixes can be offset by sample bits to change the tone of the combined sound or to synchronize different attacks or decays within the two sounds. The Merge module enables you to splice two sounds together, so the beginning of one sound cian be cleanly faded into the ending of another. The Crossfade Looping module creates smooth sustain loops where normal looping techniques fail. While not infallible, crossfade looping is so useful that it has been incorporated into the on-board operating systems of some keyboards.

Often samples need to be carefully equalized and balanced in volume to make the sample truer to the original sound. Sound Designer’s Digital Equalizer and Gain Change functions let you build equalization and amplitude changes into any sample at twice the resolution and a fraction of the cost of traditional analog equalizers. The Digital Equalizer provides five different types of high-quality filters: peak, notching, high and low shelving, and high and low pass. The Digital Equalizer module alone can greatly improve the quality of samples—for example, the right amount of peak-notch equalization adds more punch and vitality to a brass section. The Gain Change module increases or decreases volume output of the sample by dbV (decibel values) or by percentage. If a sample’s gain is increased too high, samples can be lost or clipped. To let you find a better gain-change value, the program displays the amount of clipped sample before the gain change is executed. The Gain Change module also provides a Normalize function to increase the highest point of the sample until its peak amplitude reaches 100 percent full scale. Thus sounds that were sampled at too low a volume can be easily improved to take advantage of the full dynamic range of their keyboard. Finally, Sound Designer’s Fourier Analysis module gives a 3-D display of a sample’s harmonic content throughout its duration (see “Frequency Analysis Window”). The display field can be shown from either the front or the back in mesh, graph, or chart form.

The Catch...

Sound Designer makes manipulating sampled sounds much easier, but the program has its drawbacks. For those who do not own a sampling keyboard, the complete package costs $1500 to $7000, depending upon which sampler you purchase. Moreover, the large size of sample files (20K to more than 90K) and the disk space required for backup of the sample make a hard disk a virtual necessity. With the exception of the Emulator 2 and E-Max versions of Sound Designer, transferring samples from the Mac to the sampling keyboard can take a long time. Also, Sound Designer accesses the program disk for nearly all functions—a time-consuming process, as some modules have to access the disk three or four times just to complete one function. However, considering that the next-least-expensive hardware-and-software package with similar capabilities costs about as much as a house, these drawbacks can be overlooked.

Holsinger, Erik. (October 1987). The Digital Audio Workstation. Macworld. (pgs. 162-163).

Download Sound Designer for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 6.0 up to Mac OS 8.1

Compatibility notes

Architecture: 68K

Sounds obvious, because Apple changed the serial port protocol in the late 90's, this software is not compatible with G3's and newer models.

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Mini vMac