jhnbrbr
New member
Dear friends,
I hope my first steps towards getting a virtual organ working will be of interest and encouragement to others who are thinking about doing the same. It's important to have some sort of target in mind, and my minimum requirement (for the moment,anyway) is to have two manuals plus RCO pedalboard (30 or 32 notes), a swell pedal, and some means of controlling registration from the console - not necessarily to control individual stops, but at least to select from a handful of combinations for each division.
Wishing to do all this on a shoestring budget, my first thought was to buy second-hand Casio or Yamaha keyboards on Ebay (making sure they had a MIDI OUT port, of course). As a first step, I borrowed my nephew's Yamaha PSR and bought a Mistar Midilink MIDI/USB adaptor from the local Maplins shop for £29.99. I tested this setup with Miditzer and with the Hauptwerk evaluation software. The results could hardly have been more disappointing! With Miditzer it only worked for a couple of minutes (sometimes only seconds) before everything seized up, and pressing "Esc" wouldn't fix it, the program had to be shut down and the USB cable pulled out to cure the problem. With Hauptwerk it was even worse - there was an out-of-memory error while loading the organ. It's possible that the adaptor wasn't fully compatible with Windows Vista, the main packaging said XP, and a "Vista compatible" sticker had been added later. Or maybe I just got a faulty one. I really should have taken it back to Maplins and demanded my money back, but I've been too busy.
To confirm that the adaptor was the problem, I ordered a different type from an Ebay seller (Maxexpress4u) for the princely sum of £3.98 plus £3.98 p&p. In spite of the low cost, this worked far more reliably, and I was able to hear the Hauptwerk "St Annes's" for the first time. I was now quite satisfied with the sound quality (even though my computer is a modest HP Pavilion Slimline with the soundcard it came with) but unfortunately the response left much to be desired. It wasn't just that there was a time delay - the delay seemed to me to be variable and it was extremely off-putting when playing. (By now, after reading this and other forums, I knew this problem was known as "latency").
I was still scanning Ebay for suitable second-hand keyboards, but the thought had occurred to me that a Casio or Yamaha was probably only capable of transmitting key-down and key-up messages, it would not be possible to use other controls for registration purposes. (To be honest, I'm still not absolutely sure about this). On the other hand, some of the dedicated midi controller keyboards give you assignable knobs, sliders and buttons which are ripe with possibilities. Buttons, in particular, seem very suitable for use as organ pistons. I had to have a 61 note model, of course, and not too expensive. I was drawn towards the M-Audio "Oxygen 61" with its 15 buttons, and luckily a second-hand one came available just at the right time, costing me £79 including p+p, compared to about £120 for a new one.
It was a simple matter to download a Vista driver from the M-Audio site, and the USB controller keyboard gave a very noticeable improvement relative to the Yamaha + adaptor. I could now play a traditional hymn tune or something similar quite satisfactorily. The latency problem wasn't completely banished though. It was virtually impossible to play "fast" (and I'm no virtuoso, believe me!) and anything fugal or with quickly repeated chords (eg opening of "Piece Heroique") was a disaster. I remembered reading something about the ASIO4ALL driver on the forum, and I decided to give it a try. After downloading, it appeared as an option under "Audio Device" on the Hauptwerk General Settings/Audio Outputs dialog box. Nearby, there was a button marked "Show device control panel" which was where I thought I needed to go in order to minimise the buffer size, but I was now out of my depth, and nothing I did seemed to improve the latency problem. My hopes were dashed again.
When I returned to the problem some time later, I spotted another setting farther down on the Hauptwerk dialog box: Buffer size (sample frames). I set this to the minimum value (0128) and hey presto! Suddenly everything was working like a dream. Joy, oh joy! So that is where I am at the moment - for an extremely modest outlay, I have two very nice, very different, single manual organs which I am very much enjoying (Sorry, Crumhorn Labs, I meant very much evaluating, of course!!). The next step will be to get a second keyboard working, and to find out how to make use of those buttons. After that, there's the bigger hurdle of the pedal board. If I can't find a second-hand one to midify, I may try to make from scratch (now where did I put that chainsaw?....) I will let you know how I get on. My sincere thanks to all who have posted on this subject.
Best wishes, John.
I hope my first steps towards getting a virtual organ working will be of interest and encouragement to others who are thinking about doing the same. It's important to have some sort of target in mind, and my minimum requirement (for the moment,anyway) is to have two manuals plus RCO pedalboard (30 or 32 notes), a swell pedal, and some means of controlling registration from the console - not necessarily to control individual stops, but at least to select from a handful of combinations for each division.
Wishing to do all this on a shoestring budget, my first thought was to buy second-hand Casio or Yamaha keyboards on Ebay (making sure they had a MIDI OUT port, of course). As a first step, I borrowed my nephew's Yamaha PSR and bought a Mistar Midilink MIDI/USB adaptor from the local Maplins shop for £29.99. I tested this setup with Miditzer and with the Hauptwerk evaluation software. The results could hardly have been more disappointing! With Miditzer it only worked for a couple of minutes (sometimes only seconds) before everything seized up, and pressing "Esc" wouldn't fix it, the program had to be shut down and the USB cable pulled out to cure the problem. With Hauptwerk it was even worse - there was an out-of-memory error while loading the organ. It's possible that the adaptor wasn't fully compatible with Windows Vista, the main packaging said XP, and a "Vista compatible" sticker had been added later. Or maybe I just got a faulty one. I really should have taken it back to Maplins and demanded my money back, but I've been too busy.
To confirm that the adaptor was the problem, I ordered a different type from an Ebay seller (Maxexpress4u) for the princely sum of £3.98 plus £3.98 p&p. In spite of the low cost, this worked far more reliably, and I was able to hear the Hauptwerk "St Annes's" for the first time. I was now quite satisfied with the sound quality (even though my computer is a modest HP Pavilion Slimline with the soundcard it came with) but unfortunately the response left much to be desired. It wasn't just that there was a time delay - the delay seemed to me to be variable and it was extremely off-putting when playing. (By now, after reading this and other forums, I knew this problem was known as "latency").
I was still scanning Ebay for suitable second-hand keyboards, but the thought had occurred to me that a Casio or Yamaha was probably only capable of transmitting key-down and key-up messages, it would not be possible to use other controls for registration purposes. (To be honest, I'm still not absolutely sure about this). On the other hand, some of the dedicated midi controller keyboards give you assignable knobs, sliders and buttons which are ripe with possibilities. Buttons, in particular, seem very suitable for use as organ pistons. I had to have a 61 note model, of course, and not too expensive. I was drawn towards the M-Audio "Oxygen 61" with its 15 buttons, and luckily a second-hand one came available just at the right time, costing me £79 including p+p, compared to about £120 for a new one.
It was a simple matter to download a Vista driver from the M-Audio site, and the USB controller keyboard gave a very noticeable improvement relative to the Yamaha + adaptor. I could now play a traditional hymn tune or something similar quite satisfactorily. The latency problem wasn't completely banished though. It was virtually impossible to play "fast" (and I'm no virtuoso, believe me!) and anything fugal or with quickly repeated chords (eg opening of "Piece Heroique") was a disaster. I remembered reading something about the ASIO4ALL driver on the forum, and I decided to give it a try. After downloading, it appeared as an option under "Audio Device" on the Hauptwerk General Settings/Audio Outputs dialog box. Nearby, there was a button marked "Show device control panel" which was where I thought I needed to go in order to minimise the buffer size, but I was now out of my depth, and nothing I did seemed to improve the latency problem. My hopes were dashed again.
When I returned to the problem some time later, I spotted another setting farther down on the Hauptwerk dialog box: Buffer size (sample frames). I set this to the minimum value (0128) and hey presto! Suddenly everything was working like a dream. Joy, oh joy! So that is where I am at the moment - for an extremely modest outlay, I have two very nice, very different, single manual organs which I am very much enjoying (Sorry, Crumhorn Labs, I meant very much evaluating, of course!!). The next step will be to get a second keyboard working, and to find out how to make use of those buttons. After that, there's the bigger hurdle of the pedal board. If I can't find a second-hand one to midify, I may try to make from scratch (now where did I put that chainsaw?....) I will let you know how I get on. My sincere thanks to all who have posted on this subject.
Best wishes, John.
