E-MU REPRESENTATIVE: Hi everybody. We are AES 2005 at the E-MU booth. We're showing off some new gear. Today we go the 1616 laptop digital audio system. It has all the power, DSP power and pristine I/O of our PCI line and as the name implies it has 16 inputs and 16 outputs, 10 of which are digital using ADAT and SPDIF and six are analog. Six are analog ins and outs. Two of the six inputs feature brand new mic preamps that we call Ectasy. Super low noise, very transparent, real nice preamps, 16 dB of gain so you can plug guitars, mics straight into the system. The dock basically breaks through this cable into the PCI/MCIA card that goes into any laptop, and the card actually features a DSP chip just like our PCI line, which takes the load off of the computer especially for things like mixing and effects.

What I have up on screen right now is PatchMix DSP. This basically allows you to mix your host sources so things like WAV audio or WDM audio or ASIO which come in from your DAWs or your virtual instruments, and these green ones are actually the physical I/O. Basically, this environment lets you mix up all of that stuff and send it to whatever speaker assignments you want to monitor your entire session. Basically, this is the mission control for your studio. You have discrete monitor control here with the mute and a balance control so you can actually change your speaker volumes, monitor volume you can mute when you have a phone call or something without actually changing the main mix. You might be going to a DAT, you might be going back into host software to get recorded.

Another cool feature of PatchMix is that it lets you route. Like the name implies, it's a patch bay as well as a mixer so that's how we got the name PatchMix, and the way we allow you to patch things is when you right click on a strip, we get a menu of many choices. One choice is the Insert Send. This allows you insert an output from an input. It may sound a little confusing but it's that the audio comes in and you got to send it somewhere, and so we call it an output, and basically it lets you choose any of the physical holes or the outputs of the box, or you can send it up to ASIO to get recorded or you can send it up to a WAV, for instance if you are recording into a WDM application. So you choose one of those, and you got this thing called a send that's already up there, and this is allowing you to take, for instance, mic line A, and record it into ASIO out.

Another cool send -- another cool widget that we have is called the Insert Send Return. This actually allows you to use I/O on the box to, for instance, patch into a hardware piece of equipment. For instance, you got a Lexicon reverb lying around or you have some other piece of gear that you want to use, you can just patch it up, send, and return just like on an old traditional mixer, and use it in your session. Once you create one of these, everything could be dragged and dropped, so for instance if this was one of my old reverbs, I can just drag it from one singer into another, or if I want to let everybody use it I can put it in auxiliary and turn that up. All of this is happening in hardware, in DSP, so there's no latency, there's no CPU load. It's a huge benefit especially on a laptop.

Another cool feature of the DSP is our effects system. Basically, you've got 27 different effects what we call core effects. Everything from equalizers, compressors, auto-wah filters, leveling amps, delays, this is pretty large. You can just simply grab, for instance, this compressor. I'll just grab them and drag it here, and once you click on that cell, you can see on the right hand side that the TV view comes up and you can edit the effect at will. We also made a lot of presets for you so we got something to start with, and then you can also save them once you create them.

When you integrate both of these things, the effects and the patching, cool things starts to happen with the drag and drop. Right now, I have a compressor on that [SOUNDS LIKE] half-inch strip and a send above it. So what's happening there is the microphone, for instance, comes in, hits the send and goes up to your software to get recorded, and then it goes to a compressor. So that means that your monitoring environment like your headphone environment would actually have the compressor on it. If you actually want to record that compressor, all you have to do is move it up above it so now it runs through a compressor before going to ASIO, so that's one of the cool drag and drop tricks on patch mix that you can actually create a wet or dry being the effects really, really easy. So that's the basics of PatchMix.

Another cool thing is now this is the first time we're going to be able to run Emulator X and Proteus X on a laptop. So this is really cool. A lot of people are really excited about this, so let's just launch Emulator on here. I already have it too.

So this is the Emulator X standalone. It also works in a VSTi format so you can use it as a plugin in your favorite VST application. It's a streaming or a RAM sampler so it can do disk streaming or it can read in RAM. It comes with over two gigabytes of sounds. One of the things they got loaded up right now is a Proteus composer set. This is 1,024 sounds from our world-famous Proteus 2000 sound module and also comes with a 1.6-GB piano and a whole bunch of sampling - other sounds so right off the bat you get a lot of sounds to work with.

Navigating, you know, this large a library is very difficult sometimes, so what we've done is we've created this many types of categorization to allow you to quickly find the sound you're looking for. For instance, using this category search, you can look for like BPM, bass, drum kits all by name. You can also search by number if you memorize numbers and stuff like that. We also have the single module view. This looks kind of like a Proteus 2000 where you can also choose category filters here. If you notice, all of the categories in this back will show up like synth, vocal, wind, and once you choose the categories, for instance, like orchestral, anything that you scroll through will be orchestral, so this really speeds up the process of finding that right sound, and I'll just [OVERLAPPING] [E-MU PLAYING A FEW CHORDS WITH THE E-MULATOR X].

Each preset can be heavily tweaked. The synth engine is basically from the E-4 and the Proteus 2000. It is very large, very deep, allows you to do massive editing, it has some exotic things like pitch tables, tuning tables. Each preset can actually hold two discrete effects, so each preset can have two discrete effects and then the whole thing can have three aux effects, so very, very powerful effects topology. Also, once you come out of Emulator into PatchMix, the stuff I showed you earlier, you can actually use those effects to so as a total effects and mixing system it's really, really a lot of power.

Just to take a quick look at the kind of effects we got in emulator. These effects are more focused on sound design, making the thing sound cool so we gota little more exotic variety of effects. Things like SP12ulator; what that does is mix stuff and sound really bad because nowadays stuff sounds too good that everybody wants to sound band so you can basically run into this SP12ulator that will let you get for instance 12-bit resolution that just makes stuff sound real nasty sounding. We also have another plugin called Tube which also does a similar thing. It gives you that tube gain effect, and we have Growl which has some really, really, strange things. It works really great on saxophone-type of samples with a little bit of edge, a sawtooth wave.

Also, the entire engine can be accessed here. This is the per-voice window so each sample or each voice, as what we call it, can actually be run through this entire synthesizer here. We have a massive amount of key assignment power. For instance, things like live modes where we have many, many different types of live modes of solo modes. We have three different envelopes, a massive modulation section, and of course the world-famous Z-plane filters. There are 64 different filters that you can apply on a per-voice basis. T's really, really powerful stuff.

To ease the editing again, to make this faster and faster, we also implemented a templating system so right now, right click on this filter section, each of the blocks in this synthesizer section can be templated very rapidly so you just can make -- once you have a setting that you like, you right click and you can save a template, and then once you do that, you can apply that to any other sound in the bank or, you know, any other bank you want to make. It's a library so you can keep growing it, and once you make these complex setups, you can just apply them very quickly to other sounds. Really cool.

Emulator also has a full-blown wave editor built in. It allows you to do looping and destructive editing on waveforms. Just a little list of the stuff that it does. So your standard truncate, reverse, normalize, DC filtering, and stuff like that, so basically you never have to leave emulator. You can do all your editing and sample work inside the program.

Another cool feature is that this sampler actually has samples, so we actually have the capability using for instance the 1616 Amp or any other digital audio systems to record and sample audio. Once we acquire the sample, this window will quickly allow you to chop up the sample. Basically finds silence and strips everything out, names it, places it on the keys, and so sampling is very, very rapid. So this is really great. It's finally available on a laptop.

We also are launching at this show a couple of new libraries, which probably Ashley's going to talk about, but one of them is called MSO, the Modern Symphonic Orchestra. This is 10 GB of brand new orchestral samples programed specifically for Emulator X and Proteus X. What we've done is made the articulation stuff, the stuff that's very difficult to get. You know, you all get that machine gun effect? Well, those types of articulations are much simplified with the new technology that we have in emulator, so I hope you guys could check that out. We have 11 libraries now so there's tons of sounds for emulator and it runs on a laptop, so I hope a lot more guys get into it. Thanks for listening. E-MU.