Step By Step Tutorial --------------------- To start Samplitude Opus directly from CD we assume you have "assigned" the different working directories to the CD as well. You could have done this using "MakeAssigns" on the CD. Note: if you do not have a Samplitude Setup already you might want to create the "typical" assigns (you don't have to use them, but users of Samplitude tend to speak of "RAP", "HDP" and "VIP" partitions, so it is helpful to have the same names). In a standard setup RAM samples are stored in an assignement named "RAP:". These samples have to fit into your Amiga's memory (completely) and can therefor be played back rather quickly. HD Samples (Samples that do not fit into RAM and therefor have to be loaded from HD while being played back) reside in an assignement or partition named "HDP:". It is better to have a partition for these data, since you should use at least 8kByte of block size to speed up disk access. Virtual projects, consisting of any number of RAM Samples and HD Samples, usually are stored in an assignement named "VIP:". Refer to the Amiga Guide online help for more information about the different project types. Start SamplitudeOpus the usual way by double clicking on its icon. If you want to run it directly from its CD (which is possible of course though you won't be able to safe Samplitude Opus' preferences) you should "MakeAssigns" to add the directories on the CD to the lookup path lists. Samplitude Opus will prompt you with the About Screen showing your serial number and name - or, if run from the CD, the registration window will pop up asking for your registration data. Load in your keyfile from HD (use "GET" to pop up a file requester) or type it in manually. If you do not run from CD you can save your setup after this, which will avoid having to register again next time you start Samplitude Opus. Click a mouse button or press any key to get an empty work screen. Samplitude Opus will try to clone your WB settings if you do not specify anything else in the preference menu. Two lines of gadgets will attract your attention. The upper line consists of two parts: main project functions such as open project, extract range etc. and play/record functions (the later on the right). On the bottom of the screen you see view manipulating gadgets, showing arrows in all directions. Move your cursor over all these gadgets to read a short description in the lower left part of the screen (fly-by help). Using these gadgets you can modify the display of a sample, which will be explained in detail later. Loading a demo project ---------------------- To get a basic start you should load a file from the CD. Use the menu "Project/Open/Ram" to open a file requester. Usually, if you haven't changed anything, you will see the directory "RAP:", which should have been assigned to your SamplitudeOpus CD (if you used MakeAssigns). If you have changed your settings, please type in the path manually ("SamplitudeOpus:RAP/") and load the project named "Beat_M". After a short moment of loading your display should show a WAVE representation of the sample. Of course, since Samplitude Opus is an audio application, you want to hear something - so simply press SPACE to start playback. Depending on your settings you will either hear the sample through PAULA output or on your SoundCard. You will notice that the sample is played only on the left channel. This happens due to historical reasons. Please press SPACE again to stop playback - you could as well use the tapedeck buttons in the upper right part of the screen to start and stop playback. Sample Parameters ----------------- Now press "p" or choose "Effects/Parameters" from the menu. A small window with the major settings for the project you just opened will appear. In the right half of this window you can see the volume adjustments - a long, upright slider for volume (leave this one as it is for the moment) and a smaller on top which acts as a panning adjustment. Move this slider to the center position to place the sample's playback "into the audio center", meaning: let it playback on both channels. To check whether anything has changed you can click into the WAVE window (don't click somewhere in the sample, this would let playback start from that position - just activate the window drag bar) and press SPACE. The sound will now be played back in 2 channel MONO. If your settings still show PAULA you should click on the cycle gadget to switch to Soundcard playback. Depending on the hardware you have installed you can cycle through the present soundcards. If the selected hardware does not offer the required playback frequency, which can be controled in the upper part of the parameter window, the sampling rate will be adjusted to the nearest possible frequency. This is also the case for Toccata using the latest "V12" library, which unfortunately doesn't offer 44100 Hz playback anymore but some slightly different frequency. Usually this doesn't matter but it has got some drawbacks for syncronizing playback to external media! Generally it is useful to downgrade your toccata.library to some older but problemless version (V8 is working very well). "Free" frequencies are supported for resampling and conversion purpose. Usually the frequencies specified as "free" will not be supported by sound hardware, but you can still use your soundcard for playback. Samplitude Opus will always switch to the nearest available frequency. Remember to check the parameter window if you discover any problems. Sometimes older projects have been saved with some faulty parameters, so adjusting these values will help in most cases. Close the parameter window, now that you have real 2channel playback. Using the Cursor ---------------- Since we left Loop switched on we can do some testing with the dumb disco rhythm we have on our screen. Each "block" represents some drum, the larger ones are base drum hits, the smaller Hihats. You could now specify a new start position by clicking once somewhere in the sample. A thin, vertical line, called the "hot cursor" will be drawn to show the new starting postion. Press SPACE to see the play cursor start at that position. While playback is running you can continue to work in the display. You could even specify a new starting position - if the new postion is placed more to the left the start of the next loop will begin there. If the new start position is to the right of the old one the play cursor will immediately jump to that new position and continue play there. Of course Samplitude Opus offers highly comfortable ways to "browse" through a sample. We will learn more about this later. Ranges ------ If you now should want to play only a part of the complete sample we have to look at ranges. You might want to stop playback before the beat gets on your nerves... Again click somewhere in the sample, this time holding down the mouse button and moving the mouse to the left or right. Just as in any real Amiga program you will "draw" a range which represents the now active area. If you restart playback you will see and hear that only the active range will be played back. It doesn't matter whether a range is created from left to right or vice versa. It is possible that you have created some rectangular range which now lies like a small block somewhere on your sample - this doesn't matter for the moment, it is needed for amplitude changes in advanced situations. You can simplify range display by activating "Vertical Fix" in the "Preferences" menu. Doing this the range will be displayed as a "full size block". Of course the state of vertical fix is saved in the prefs file if you choose "Save Setup". We will now try to save some HD space by only saving one main loop of the rhythm. Create a range starting just left to the fourth larger "block" of sampling data, hold down the button and move the cursor to a position just left of the second block from the right. What we want to get is just a "Dumm-Di-Dumm-Chick" sound. If you didn't get a perfect range right away, don't worry. You can easily change the borders of a range. Click somewhere in the active area, hold down the mouse button and move the mouse pointer OVER the border you want to adjust (left or right). If you move up or down the vertical borders will be adjusted - moving left or right will adjust the horizontal borders. The border you cross first will be adjusted - which you can see immediately. You can also get the range smaller by moving over the border and going back - this time the range border will narrow the range. Try to to create an active range that plays back the rhythm good enough. We are only playing around here, so don't worry if it isn't perfect right away. Stop playback and click on the right most gadget of the project icons. It is the typical "Extract" gadget many people will know from high quality paint tools like Photoshop (two angles overlaying each other representing the range borders). The fly-by-help shows "extract range" which means that the current project will be reduced to only the active range - the rest of the sample data will be deleted. This is by far easier than having to manually delete blank data at start and end of a sample. The newly created project could be saved if you wanted. Click on the "Save project" icon or choose "Save" or "Save As..." from the menu. Effects ------- What would a sample editor be without a reverb function? Samplitude Opus offers a lot of DSP effects, though the menu entries don't reveal what can be done with them. Many effects can be created using the few entries given and specifying the parameters according to what you need. We will now add some force reverb to our mini rhythm. Press Right-Amiga and "A" or choose "Select All" from the range menu to select the complete sample (most functions in Samplitude Opus are range sensitive). You can find different effects in the effects menu. Reverb is a "DSP" effect, meaning "Digital Signal Processing", so you have to enter the submenu "Effects/DSP/Reverb". A small parameter window will ask you for the needed standard parameters for the reverb. For a test enter "Amount 50%", meaning the reverb strength should be set at 50 percent of the original data. Use a "decay" of 60%, making the reverb fade off fast enough to not "swamp out" everything else. At last specify "60ms" as "Early reflections" value - early reflections shouldn't appear to soon in normal reverb situations. The larger the "Early reflections" value is, the "larger" the simulated room is since the first reflections will take longer to arrive at the auditor's ears. Click on OK to let Samplitude Opus create the effect. You can check the result and will get a first impression of what digital signal processing can do to your samples. Time to loose a few words about effects. Of course effects are a major feature of all sampling programs you always should keep in mind that it is the original data that makes a sample "sound good". Try to use only a minimum of effects - just like in text creation where you should never use many fonts, many styles or many colors. Doing so would end in a sound chaos which noone wants to hear. If you follow this simple rule creating a very strong effect ONCE can give you much more impressing results - like a very quick and hard reverb which will lead to a "roboter-like" modulation. Why is the Reverb Parameter window titled "Echo"? Easy: Reverb is just a small element of what musicians consider "Room simulation". In fact Reverbs are made of many, fast echoes. Many situations don't need more - consider drum parts which only need some "wetness" in sound. Reverb is good enough for this. But real room simulation is much more - and here Samplitude Opus currently is the only program on Amiga that offers reality near room simulation. The routine used for creating real room simulations is called "Convolution". If you want to learn more about Convolution please read along, we will discuss this feature later since it would take us too far at this point. Importing/Exporting ------------------- A very important function of Sample Edit software is its import and export module. Samplitude Opus supports a number of common sound formats such as Wave (RIFF), AIFF, IFF as well as some "headerless" formats like ADPCM (a lossy compression scheme), RAW (Mono data) or CDDA (Stereo interleaved 16Bit data). In fact many formats could be imported using RAW import or CDDA Import - all you have to know is the byte order of the data. It would be possible to import an AIFF file using Samplitude Opus' CDDA importer and setting it to "MSB First", Stereo and the project type you need. Keep in mind that though RAM samples are more easy to handle, being loaded faster and edited with much more convenience you should always make sure to have lots of RAM installed when dealing with large RAM projects. Samplitude Opus needs at least twice its internal buffer size for each track - there are two tracks in a Stereo project. Additionally the complete sample has to be loaded. So whenever you are dealing with somehow undefined data you should use HD projects which only rely on enough HD space being available. Back to CDDA. Since this "format" (in fact only being simple stereo interleaved raw data) is used by CD ROM drives as well as CD Rom writers we included support for CDDA. Some Writers use the "Intel" way of handling a WORD (16Bit wide data), where the least significant bits come first (the "lower byte" being placed before the "high byte"). Other writers (most) support the "Motorola" format (MSB First) where the higher byte comes first (this is the way people in the western countries read their numbers). If you should encounter strange "noisy" scratch instead of the desired imported sample it is very likely that somehow a "byte swap" has happened - LSB instead of MSB or vice versa. When importing sound just retry it with the other setting. More file format support will be added in the future as demands are comming in. Note that it is neither possible nor really desireable to support each and every format someone somewhere might be wanting to use. In the "real" world two majorly supported formats exist: WAVE (on Microsoft platforms) or AIFF (on Apple, Amiga or SGI platforms). Every kind of data currently needed for Audio can be stored in these formats, even information data that is not defined today. There is currently no need for other formats to be defined or supported except for very special occasions. Project Management ------------------ As we have mentioned before there are two major project types in Samplitude: RAM Projects (usually being called "RAP"s) and Hard Disc Projects ("HDP"s). Both are handled identically in Samplitude's inner routines - in fact a HDP could also be stored in your RAM Disk, which of course wouldn't make much sense. The difference appears when you LOAD such projects: a HDP will never be loaded into RAM completely but it's visual representation (peak data) whereas a RAM project is loaded completely. This makes LOADING RAPs slower, while EDITING them is faster (since all data are present). Each project can hold as many Cursors and Ranges as you want. A range is, as described above, a "selected" area inside a complete sample which can be used for playlist access or in VIPs (see below). A cursor usually is a hint to find a specific position inside a large sample. When recording data you can create PAUSE cursors simply by pressing "Pause" (in the SoundCard record panel, not in MPro). Cursor positions can be "called up" by the keyboard or via the menu functions. Press Shift-1 to Shift-0 to create a cursor at your current position (it will be marked with a small triangle and the number you pressed in the upper part of the sample window). Press 1 to 0 to access the previously stored cursor positions - even while playing back the sample. Ranges can also be stored and accessed by the keyboard. Press Shift-F1 to Shift-F10 to store Ranges and F1 to F10 to access the previously stored ones. When mixing or editing large samples these direct-access functions can be very helpful. Each project can also hold as many tracks as you like (not in the LITE versions). Currently, due to CPU limitations, you can only playback a maximum of 16 Tracks, but more tracks can be used to edit them simultaneously (cutting, fading etc.). Samplitude Opus offers "manager windows" for ranges and projects. You often have to keep many projects open when dealing with VIPs but of course do not want to see all their windows (chaotic). So in VIP modus you can close project windows, if their projects are in use somewhere. You can use the "Project Manager", accessable by the menu entry "Project/Manager For/Projects" - or by "Right-Amiga E". The window being opened will display all projects currently kept in memory. Double clicking on one of the entries will immediately pop up the project's window. Similarily you can use the Range Manager to keep control over the Ranges stored for your active project. Open the manager's window by pressing Right-Amiga J or choose its function from "Project/Manager For/Ranges". All stored ranges for the active project will be shown - each one can be activated by clicking on it. It will immediately be shown in the wave editor window. If you change the active project the Range Manager's window will immediately be updated. Convolution ----------- Recreating the physical audio reflections in a given room is simple using Samplitude Opus' Convolution routine. It analizes a given "noise print", sampled in the room you want to simulate and uses the gained data for early reflections, reverb decay as well as filter effects. Filters are of high importance for room simulations because depending on where you are the sound you hear is filtered very differently! An empty hall has a completely different filter characteristic than a crowded theatre, where higher frequencies are silenced out much faster. To give you a first impression of the incredible possibilites Convolution offers we have put a small number of "noise prints" on your Samplitude Opus CD. Please press "l" or choose "Load RAM" from the project menu and type in the path to the Convolution files on your CD: "SamplitudeOpus:RAP/Convolution/". You will find three files here offering three very different reverb simulations. Load "REV_1" for testing purpose. Play back the loaded REV_1 sample and you will hear some kind of hand clap in a large room. Generally "clap" or "high peak" noise is used to create a noise print for Convolution. Select All (this is already done when the project is loaded) and copy the range to your clip board. To do this press "c" or choose "Copy" from the Edit menu. You can now safely close the REV_1 window, the data needed for Convolution is in your clipboard. Your Rhythm sample will reappear. If you still have the reverb applied to the data please reload the original data since we want to hear what happens. Please again select all since Convolution should be applied to the complete sample. Now select "Effects/DSP/Convolution" which will show the parameter window of the Convolution routine. Two values have to be adjusted. "Effekt" means the attenuation of the effect data - specify a value of "-6dB" or near to this for testing purpose (you could also boost the effect, but this is critical since it might lead to clipping). "Original" can be used to change the strength of the original signal. Again a slightly attenuation (about 80% is ok) should be used this time to avoid clipping. After that click on OK and ... stand by. It will take some time to calculate the effect since you are now applying a reverb, a basic echo, a volume adjustment and FFT filters according to the data in your clipboard. When the calculation process has ended press on SPACE to hear the result. REV_1 is an artificial noise print taken from an industry reverb engine. Still you will hear a big difference between this effect and the previously created "Reverb" without filter functions. Now play around a bit to learn about the possibilities. Very crazy effects can be generated by applying maybe a Bongo drum to a solo guitar (Bongo copied to clip and "convolved" to the guitar track) or totally different combinations. SEK'D has released a CDRom containing noise prints of high-price, high-quality effect units which can now be simulated on your Samplitude System!