Vienna 2.0 Review

I truly hope everybody who has downloaded Vienna 2.0 and tried it please tell everybody what do you think about Vienna 2.0.

This is what I think after tried it for half an hour (only). And this is my comparison than the old Vienna 1.0 and other similar programs.

• The conversion from SBK to SF2 is faster than SF1TOSF2.EXE program.
• Faster loading of SF2 than Vienna 1.0's SBK. BUT, slower importing SF2 bank.
• Better GUI and Win95 Tree style to let you organise your soundfonts.
• Drag&drop feature only allowed intra instruments and preset section but not between samples, instruments and presets. There is also no Drag-select feature as in Win95 Explorer which we can select multiple instruments at one single drag-click.

But it's very fun to toy with the presets section which is imposssible done by the Vienna 1.0 and other SF editors. For example, I want to make a REAL orchestra hit. I simply create a new melody preset to drag other instruments like all the string families, brasses, woodwinds and even guitars into the new preset. Wow, the REAL Orchestra Hits and HOLD with loop (read: the sound generated is limited up to 6 instruments, you can't more than that)

All the generators like the envelopes, modulators, pitch and effects are integrated on the same interface, which doesn't mess up like the old Vienna style. However, we can't hide the windows (or the new term, frame). We can't even move or organise the frame (Yup! new term) too, just only resize whatever V2 allowed. This really make editing a lot faster than before. There is also color indication for you to know which value you've changed and the default value.

For example, if I wish to add samples to a instrument, I can't simply drag a sample from "samples section" into the instrument. But we have the right mouse button menu to do this function. However, in my opinion, the drag&drop would be easier to use as we can hear the sound before we want to add it to the instrument. But Vienna 2.0 couldn't do this both as we couldn't hear the sound in the "sample section". I just hope there is Awave's right mouse menu for "Play Audio" ...

The instrument/bank import manager is a lot better than V1. However, it's VERY slow to load a (large) reference bank. And still no drag & drop feature to import banks. (which could make management a lot faster and easier... Vienna 2.1, CL?)

• Also no multiple file open. If so, we can do drag&drop between two or more SF banks.

And also, about the MIDI-key (0 - 127) and Octave-key (C-1 to G9), the octave key is only available on the status bar (preference... to setup this) but not in other dialog like changing the Root-key, only digit appeared but not pitch. For musician, displaying the pitch key is simpler as we know how high/low the note is. But displaying only 0 to 127 digit really sucks sometimes.

This half hour test is mainly on user-friendly and accesible tools. My GUI review is upto here. Now this is my question:

Can anybody teach me how to configure the envelopes for certain effects? I really have no idea what's about the modulator and volume envelopes. Also please, about the LFOs too!

• Why do we need to adjust those envelope and LFOs?
• What is the effect after twicking some values?
• What is the "attack, delay, decay, to pitch, filter cutoff, ..."

But at least I know what happened when I changed the pitch, reverb and chorus...