Question Concerning Internal Memory

[Sleep of Reason]

"Tempest has 4 MB of internal flash memory to hold Sounds, Beats, Projects, and system settings. This is broken down into two sections internally, one small 128 KB section formatted to hold Sounds, and a larger 3.7 MB section to hold Beats, Projects, and system."

What did people think they were going to do with a whopping () 4 MB even if DSI did implement user samples? The 24 bit samples I have from the DMX alone takes up 4.5 MB. Personally I don't really care about user samples, but I'm wondering, just on average from users with experience with the Tempest, approximately how many sounds/beats/projects does 4 MB get you?

[Sleep of Reason]

Not that you'd even get 4 MB considering how things are allocated including the system itself taking up space. One would think any talk of user samples would have been immediately silenced by this information.

The site ofc mentions this:
"The larger section is shared, so how much it holds is dependent on the types of files saved. For example, if you only saved Projects, you would be able to save roughly 60. (The average Project size is around 65 kB.) The number is dependent on how large the sequences are in each Beat, since they vary in size. This is quite a lot when you consider that each Project contains 16 Beats, each of which contains a sequence and up to 32 Sounds! If you were only saving Beats, you can save at least 500. When shipped, there are 15 Projects in memory, and 2.7 MB of available space. You may want to delete any factory Project that you don’t need to make room for your own files. You can always download the factory files again from our Web sit."

Thus my question is, do you find the estimate of 60 projects to be roughly correct in your experience? More importantly do you feel like it's an adequate amount?

[joosep]

I dont save projects, as a project is 32 beats, thats just too much to handle.
I save beats, basically one song is one beat for me. Ive had hundreds of "songs" saved on the Tempest without any issues, never run out of space.
The sound limit I have hit tho. At some point Tempest wont allow you to save more sounds, there is some limit. Havent looked into the numbers.

[muleskinner]

I'm the opposite - I tend to save projects. I nearly always max out the beats per project and often design a load of sounds from scratch per project.

I save a few beats as reference 'kits' but probably only have five or six of those.

I don't use saved sounds much due to the fact that FX slider settings aren't saved with them (huge oversight, DSI).

I doubt very much I could get to 60 projects (I have maxxed out the memory in the past) but there's enough space to work on anything I have going concurrently and when I'm done with it I just back it up, also all the factory projects get deleted!

[Razmo]

I'm pretty sure, that the samples are NOT stored in this flash RAM at all... it is stored in a custom flash chip that also can playback the samples, made by another company, and that is the exact reason why user samples never made it... DSI relied on third party stuff that could not deliver the promised user samples in the end (plenty of info on this subject in this forum)... I'm pretty certain that IF user samples was to be possible, you would actually overwrite the factory ones, and that space is probably larger than 4MB ... besides... most of the samples are not that long, and they are mono... many do not even sound like they are the full 44.1KHz (otherwise they are very poorly sampled... which some of them also are as you can clearly hear noise in the tails of longer decaying sounds, and they also sound a bit dull)... so yes... I actually think that those samples could easily fit about 4MB... mono drumsamples this short do not take up that much space... that's my experience from editing percussion samples in the past for other sample players

I'd say that it's maybe possible to fit these samples in less than 4MB if it was done right.

besides, I do not see the samples as simple one-shot sounds of real percussion... if you wanted to use them "as is" you'd probably get rather disappointed... in my point of view, it's a not very modernly chosen set of percussion sounds... most are boring acoustic percussion, with a clear and very abrupt cut in their "tails", and many are the cliche sounds of a few vintage drummachines which are painstakingly boring to say the least... sounding almost like if they are samples taken from a late 80's early 90's digital drummachine... to me they are pretty much useless as stand alone samples... and with the single cycle samples from the VS being with wrong loop points in many of them, making them buzzy as hell, I'd call the quality of the samples way below average really.

So you would need to view these samples completely different... i see them as building blocks to help sculpt other sounds from them... "enhance them" so to speak... mangle them with some filter modulation... mix them with some synthesis transient magic... fade their ends in mixed with synthetic transients etc.... if you do this there are pretty many things usable to do with these samples, even the ones with wrong loop points (clicks/buzzing)... the secret with the Tempest I believe is to be creative with what you've got, instead of constantly thinking about what it cannot do (I did that mistake twice before).

Somehow I wish that at least DSI could fix the loop points somehow... but I know this will not happen... but it would have made the single cycle waveforms so much more useful with the integrated synthesizer part really... You can somewhat fix this by using the filter cutoff, but it needs to be about only halfway open to make this work, completely taking away the sounds brightness... perfect for more mellow synth sounds, but not very useful for anything else.

[Razmo]

I dont save projects, as a project is 32 beats, thats just too much to handle.
I save beats, basically one song is one beat for me. Ive had hundreds of "songs" saved on the Tempest without any issues, never run out of space.
The sound limit I have hit tho. At some point Tempest wont allow you to save more sounds, there is some limit. Havent looked into the numbers.

I read somewhere that the sound limit is about 640 sounds... which is not that many considering all other new Sequential synths have about 1024 including factory presets (which can usually be overwritten).

[Razmo]

If I had made the samples for Tempest I'd have gone a completely different route really... the Tempest has a powerful synthesis engine capable of doing many varied synthetic percussion sounds, so to force people into being creative with this I'd have focused the samples solely on high quality acoustic percussion and waveform texture building blocks.... the kind of sounds that it would be impossible to actually synthesize with the analog oscillators.

Thus samples like vintage drummachines, and electronic percussion would have been removed completely. I'd have focused much more varied on acoustic stuff, like many other things than just acoustic drumkits... a lot more ethnic percussion and weird stuff being hit like pots and pans etc.... giving the sample set as varied and flexible a palette to choose from as possible. Also more waves like the noise-types which are looped textures... other timbres would be useful there but just noise types... more metallic textures etc... simply; more building blocks to work with. Even if there would only be space for half as many samples as there is now, because of better sound quality and sample lengths it would have been more beneficial in my point of view.

Also... with the samples being this little usable on their own, it would have been nice if there were sound manipulating features between the two digital oscillators... like Sync, Ringmod and FM... just like with the Evolver digital oscillators... but I guess this was not a feature of the sample playing mechanism inside the third party chip DSI used... but it would have allowed for the samples to morph into completely other useful sounds and textures.

[Sleep of Reason]

Personally I too am more interested in getting non-tradition percussive sounds out of the Tempest as I'm a trained drummer, so I don't need it to cover that sort of thing. That's exactly why I want an open ended synthesis engine instead of one that's mainly predefined. However, 4 MB is nothing regardless of how short the sounds are or that they're in mono. I have 1 GB (a minuscule fraction of my overall samples) that I'd use comprised of mainly plucked sounds, kalimba, Hapi, tank, single cycle waveforms, and Mellotron samples. I'm sure this can be condensed somewhat by reducing the bit-depth & making sure they're in mono like a lot of machines do, but even then 4 MB wouldn't even remotely cover it. Again, I'm not really bothered either way as I'm not big on mucking with samples. It is nevertheless worrisome how limited its saving capacity is from the sound of it.

[Razmo]

Personally I too am more interested in getting non-tradition percussive sounds out of the Tempest as I'm a trained drummer, so I don't need it to cover that sort of thing. That's exactly why I want an open ended synthesis engine instead of one that's mainly predefined. However, 4 MB is nothing regardless of how short the sounds are or that they're in mono. I have 1 GB (a minuscule fraction of my overall samples) that I'd use comprised of mainly plucked sounds, kalimba, Hapi, tank, single cycle waveforms, and Mellotron samples. I'm sure this can be condensed somewhat by reducing the bit-depth & making sure they're in mono like a lot of machines do, but even then 4 MB wouldn't even remotely cover it. Again, I'm not really bothered either way as I'm not big on mucking with samples. It is nevertheless worrisome how limited its saving capacity is from the sound of it.

The secret is in how well sounds have their tails truncated really... the way the stock samples are truncated, plus the mono thing (that does half the size after all) really do allow for a lot of samples... but if you want long ssamples with tails that is not just cut off at -48dB or higher, then 4MB will of course not get you very far... for that kind of thing you'd want a Prophet X or a drummachine with much more memory.

But honestly... if it's just building blocks, then cutting off the ends (fading them a bit out of course) and even downsampling a few will allow quite a bit in just 4MB... and if you want to use them as building blocks, with the analog oscillators to create the "missing tails", it really does not matter that much... I guess I see the Tempest as sort of like a drummachine's "Roland D50" ... I'll use the samples for both transients and tails.

But certainly I'd love to be able to choose my own set of 4MB samples... in fact I'd be happy if that was possible... to create one 4MB bank with the samples I find most useful... I'd not even want to change them after that, seeing it as a ROM really... but we all know it ain't going to happen.

Besides... I'm not even certain if the custom chip has 2, 4 or even 8MB of samples... and anyway... it does not matter... it is what it is, and I'll just have to get as much as possible out of the stock samples... It'll be fun to see what you can conjure up with them.

[Razmo]

And about saving capacity... I'm not really worried about that. 640 single sounds to be used as "building blocks" to load into a beat is more than enough for me... creating 640 sounds will take one hell of a lot of time anyway.

After the sounds have been made, it's just a matter of loading the ones you want into a beat, and then mix and match them to each other on a "per project base"... and then save that beat. I'm not going to be saving any projects, just beats and there can be quite a lot of those before those almost 4MB have been used up.

For users wanting to use more beats per project and using the song chain function I might see a bigger problem with the lack of memory though... but still... everything can be backed up using SysEx.

[Sleep of Reason]

I wasn't aware of the poor implementation of the Prophet VS waveforms... That really bums me out & sounds like something that really should have been fixed. 

[Razmo]

I wasn't aware of the poor implementation of the Prophet VS waveforms... That really bums me out & sounds like something that really should have been fixed.

Yeah... it's not a great thing to be honest... it sounds like some of the VS waveforms are one sample off in their loops, but it's probably because of compression instead maybe.. .If I recall right, the chip was capable of having compressed samples, and when you're working with single cycles, even the slightest compression flaw could do this... If the sample was one sample off in the loop, then you'd be able to hear a pitch deviation as well, and that is not the case... so maye it's the compression... not sure why though.

I can still use the VS waveforms though if they are filter modulated by analog oscillator 1... then you probably will not care about that little inconsistency...

with that said ... i also noticed a click in one of the noise textures... that is a longer sample, but you can clearly hear it's loop point as it gives of a slight click.