EAWPATS Release 12 (at least that's the last time I edited this file...)
April, 2002

This is a collection of Gravis UltraSound patches for use with a GUS, or with
"softsynth" midi players such as Cubic Player and TiMidity.  I hope that
all of these patches are the best ones you've ever heard.  I've worked really
hard to try to ensure this.  I collected patches from the Ultrasound mirrors,
Midia, Kurzweil archives, Roland archives, Yamaha archives, Maui, maybe a few
from MAZ, and just about every known source of patches on the net.  I have
tried to leave no stone unturned.

I have removed clicks, changed volumes of samples within multipart patches
so that they are the same relative to each other, relooped samples, created
new instruments by combining others, edited out bad samples, remapped the
note mappings to samples, rekeyed samples, retuned samples, changed
envelopes, hand edited some to remove oversampling, and just about any other
kind of manipulation you can think of.  Just because many patches are the
same size as they originally were doesn't mean they haven't been improved in
some way or another :)

I think by now I have listened to every patch while being played in a midi
file, so I've heard them over all sorts of ranges not intended for the
instruments, in combination with instruments that might be slightly out of
tune with the one in question, and heard most if not all the waveforms in
multipatch instruments.  Bigger does not necessarily equal better.  Don't be
fooled by the small sizes of some of these patches.  Hopefully all the
patches now in the collection will sound good in every midi file they are
used in.  PLEASE send me any patches you find that are better than the ones
I've selected.

The file patref24.hlp is a Windows help file I got from the Maui ftp site.
It's quite dated by now, but is still useful as a list of places to get
patches.  I've included it as a resource for those who may wish to continue
the quest for better patches.




COMPARISON OF SOUND QUALITY:

Once I turn on the hardware reverb on my XG card so that there are good
reverb effects applied to the TiMidity output, many midi actually sound
BETTER than my Yamaha SW60XG card.  Sure, any XG midi that has fancy
variation effects or funky echoes won't sound quite like it was intended, but
the instruments themselves sound just as good usually.  I am very satisfied
with the patches that I have currently assembled.  It beats the snot out of
any softsnyths like Wingroove, Virtual Soundcanvas, Yamaha S-YG20, Netsynth,
etc.  The Yamaha S-YG50 is pretty good though, since it supports all the cool
XG effects of their real soundcards.  Still, I think that TiMidity with my
patch set is a better choice overall.  The built in reverb is ok, and the
pseudo reverb and disabling of fast note cutoffs can make some pieces sound
more full as well, so even if you don't have hardware reverb you can still
get some good results.  Even without reverb though, it's still the winner.




PLAYERS THAT CAN USE THESE PATCHES:

TiMidity is THE best midi player that uses GUS patches.  It sounds SO much
better than Cubic Player, since it handles so many things that Cubic
doesn't, like correct volume, looping, sustained notes, better sound quality,
envelopes, modulation wheel, chorus, reverb, and other more minor stuff.
Originally a UNIX program, it has ports for DOS and Win95 as well.  I could
never get the DOS port to handle the SoundBlaster correctly and it sounded
terrible, but the PC speaker support can be fun :)

Cubic Player was the first midi player I had.  It has lots of really cool
stuff to look at.  Hi-res spectrum analyzers, note dots, oscilliscopes,
list of instruments currently being used, which patches inside the
instruments are being used, what notes they are keyed to, their size, and
much much more.  It also takes a lot less processor time than TiMidity, running
very happily on my old 486.  On some Pentiums, like mine and a friend's, Cubic
will freeze while playing just about anything.  The only way to get around this
problem is to disable the internal cache on the CPU.  Why?  I have no idea.  
It's really bizzare.  It DOES work though, and keeps it from crashing.  On my
P133, this slows things down to slower than my old 486DX50, so be prepared to
select 8 bit sound quality to save processor time if you're unlucky enough to
have this problem.  Running it under Win95 seems to somehow avoid this problem
as well, but not 100% of the time.  Version 1.7 is the latest version which has
included reverb effects.  The newer versions don't have them and require an
ultrasnd.ini file which is a different format than default.cfg (which in turn
is a different format than the current gravis.cfg).  The newer versions,
however, don't have the weird lockup problem I mentioned above.  The
default.cfg and ultrasnd.ini files included are outdated and are no longer
supported by me, since I don't use Cubic for midi now that TiMidity is SO much
better.  If you REALLY want updated files that are in sync with my current
release, ask me nicely and I'll take the time to update them.

To sum it up, get TiMidity for awesome quality, get Cubic for really cool
stuff to watch on the screen.  The default.cfg and ultrasnd.ini are included
for use with Cubic, and the gravis.cfg is in the format needed by TiMidity.
Cubic won't support the extra drumsets and SFX that are in the DRUMSFX
addon though.

PS. I have heard that CSOUND does an OK job too, but I have not tried it.




GS AND XG MIDI SUPPORT:

The newer hacked versions of TiMidity (these evolved into TiMidity++) support
mapping of XG sound effects to their appropriate instruments.  I used to have
a separate addon set of patches, DRUMSFX, which included several extra
drumsets and the patches needed for the SFX banks.  Now that CD-R's and zip
drives are much more prevalent, downloads are faster, and hard drives are
cheap, the extra 7 megs or so that the addon takes up really isn't worth
the hassle (or confusion) of keeping it as an optional download anymore.
The extra drums and sound effects are no longer a separate set as of
Release 10.  The full distribution now contains everything you will need to
play GS and XG midi as close to how they were intended as is possible with
the current state of the art in free midi renderers.




WHERE TO GET TIMIDITY++:

http://www.goice.co.jp/member/mo/timidity/.




INSTALLATION AND USAGE OF TIMIDITY:

See install.txt.




THANKS:

I would like to thank the following people for their input, patches, and
anything else that has aided me in improving this patch set:

Richard Sanders
Masanao Izumo
Sergey Batov
Laurent Martelli
Tasos Tzimoro
Andy Bakke
Pavel Vrabec
Julie Brandon
John Sankey
Pedro Lopez
Jim Oliver
Jeff Medaglia
All the people who sampled these patches in the first place
Anyone else I may have forgotten at the moment




Eric A. Welsh <ewelsh@gpc.wustl.edu>
Center for Molecular Design
Center for Computational Biology
Washington University
St. Louis, MO
