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By John Townley October 14, 1999 Conexant Systems, Inc. this week expanded its audio offering with a family of software audio modules for low-cost audio/modem products. With the Conexant Player family, the company now offers a complete line of audio software products sold in combination with Conexant modems. Conexant's patented audio software solutions enable professional-quality wavetable audio synthesis for low-cost PCs. The Conexant Player combines the flexibility of software-based instruments with the real-time performance characteristics of Conexant's EndlessWave audio-streaming technology. It consists of a MIDI sequencer, two General MIDI(GM) compatible sounds sets and a synthesis engine with up to 256 voices of polyphony, allowing 256 notes to be played concurrently, the company said. The Conexant Player is a Windows-based software application that plays GM and GM2 files. It provides all the features of a conventional CD player including a playlist manager for hours of background music. A piano keyboard appears on-screen for use during content audition/creation, and the MPU401 in/out port supports live performance with an external piano keyboard. Minimum system requirements are Pentium II 266 MHz or higher with Windows 95 or later operating system. The Conexant Player features three user-selectable operation modes: WaveStream Soft Synthesizer, the EndlessWave Consumer and the EndlessWave Pro. With the legacy WaveStream mode, the user can create music with an 8 MB sound palette for GM instrument cache. In EndlessWave Consumer mode, music is created using a 14 MB GM instrument cache. Upgrading to the 150 MB or 500 MB sound libraries enables EndlessWave Pro mode, which provides access to sound libraries of unlimited size. In EndlessWave Pro mode, real-time audio streaming is not limited by the system RAM as in the other modes. Instead, sounds from the hard drive/CD-ROM or Internet audio streaming engines can also be used to create music. "Conexant's software audio technology is capable of emulating a hardware synthesizer, while at the same time reducing latency, the amount of time that passes between when a key is struck and when a sound is heard," said Conrad A. Maxwell, manager of technology planning for Conexant. |
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