AAS Lounge Lizard; New Windows

AAS's Lounge Lizard provides an alternative to Emagic's modelled electric pianos for Windows users.

The initial information leaking out about Microsoft's next major Windows operating system release doesn't look very promising for musicians. Codenamed Longhorn, and expected to be launched in Spring 2004, it was originally expected to be an upgrade to Windows XP, but now incorporates some radically new technology. This includes a new 3D-enabled user interface, a security architecture called Palladium, and the new object-based filing system Microsoft have been talking about for nearly 10 years now.

The new interface will take advantage of the capabilities of modern 3D graphics cards to render a more photo-realistic display, although presumably those with lesser hardware will be able to disable the extras to regain some speed. Graphic features (not a million miles away from what Apple now have in OS X) are likely to include more alpha-blending for transparency effects, smoother transitions using higher-quality anti-aliasing, better ClearType pixel rendering, and more advanced video effects such as convolution.

The new filing system will facilitate many forms of advanced searches, including more intelligent content-based searches, and the database functionality needed is apparently based on technology developed for a forthcoming version of SQL Server (code-named Yukon). DVD-R and DVD-R/W burning functions will be built into Longhorn as standard, enabling users to copy video from a digital camcorder direct to DVD without using the hard drive, and a more advanced version of XP's existing Movie Maker will also be included, this time supporting multiple video and audio tracks. If you're interested in making movies on your PC in addition to music, you might like to check out the latest beta of Movie Maker 2, which can be downloaded today from www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/moviemaker/downloads/moviemaker2beta.asp.

Palladium is what Microsoft describe as a 'secure run-time environment', designed to protect PC users from hacking, privacy invasion and spam, which will be achieved by incorporating hardware security chips and special microprocessors (to be manufactured by Intel and AMD) into new computers. These chips will uniquely identify a user to their PC, but it's claimed that they won't interfere with the normal running of the computer and will be ignored by legacy operating systems and applications. In a nutshell, the Palladium features will only offer benefits when running Palladium-aware applications.

Having complete freedom from virus and worm attacks, along with unsolicited emails, certainly sounds worth having, as does the ability to verify downloaded information before you can access it, and being able to encrypt your own data so that it's safe from prying eyes both on and off-line. If you send an email marked 'private', for example, only the designated recipient would be able to open it, and you could also make it time-sensitive, so that it could only be opened during a specific week. More interesting, though, is perhaps the news that Palladium can be used to securely distribute audio and video data over the Internet, which will be of huge interest to record and film companies.

However, if all Longhorn audio streams are going to be encrypted, this may have worrying consequences for music applications. Even worse, since files have to be verified before you can access them, no plug-ins will be able to run unless they have first been certified by Microsoft, which could effectively wipe out most shareware and freeware offerings at a stroke.

The biggest change is that Longhorn will be incompatible with all previous versions of Windows, and aims to achieve a new standard of performance by abandoning all legacy links, including dropping support for PCI expansion slots in favour of the 'next generation' 3GIO I/O (now dubbed PCI Express), as discussed in PC Notes November 2002. Mind you, if we're all using FireWire audio interfaces by then, perhaps we won't miss our old PCI soundcards so much. Thankfully, though, another version of XP, or at least an update, is likely to appear before Longhorn, probably some time during 2003, which might end up being the final Microsoft operating system to support PCI soundcards. We'll have to wait and see.

PC users are a little limited when it comes to choosing physically modelled electric piano sounds. Since Emagic's EVP88 physically-modelled electric piano is a Logic-only instrument, making it effectively Mac-only now, the only alternative was EVP88's baby brother, EVP73. While this is compatible with any VST Instrument host, it isn't available in a DXi version suitable for Sonar users, and has considerably fewer features.

Lounge Lizard is a physically modelled electric piano from Applied Acoustic Systems that was originally reviewed in SOS October 2002 on a Mac. However, since it's also available for Windows in stand-alone, VST Instrument and DXi formats, Lounge Lizard would therefore seem to be an ideal candidate for any PC user desiring the authentic sounds of the famous Fender Rhodes and Wurlitzer pianos. So, after playing with Lounge Lizard recently, here are my own thoughts from the perspective of a Windows user.

Lounge Lizard is based on the 'epiano' instrument bundled with Tassman (reviewed in SOS July 2000), although it's been considerably enhanced with many more parameters, a more refined dynamic response and a completely new effect section. The sounds themselves are extremely impressive, providing a huge range of electric pianos, including Fender Rhodes, Wurlitzer, and RMI pianos in abundance, plus a host of more unusual ones made of materials such as plastic and wood, and more 'off the wall' sounds using more extreme settings and effects. All proved highly expressive and responsive to playing nuances, in addition to being easy to edit.

As you might expect from a physically modelled instrument, CPU overhead is somewhat higher than the average software instrument. When running as a VST Instrument inside Cubase using my Pentium III 1GHz processor, Tassman's 'epiano' imposes a fixed CPU overhead of 20 percent for its default four-voice polyphony. However, Lounge Lizard has dynamic voice allocation, so that with the same four voices it idles at about 10 percent, only rising to 20 percent when all four notes are being played, even with the new effects switched in.

A preferences option lets you choose the maximum number of Lounge Lizard voices in four-voice increments from four to 32. With the default eight voices (which is about the minimum required for most piano parts), I still measured about 10 percent overhead when idling, and about 30 percent with all voices sounding, while with 16 voices these rose to 15 and 65 percent respectively. This was the maximum I could safely run on my processor, and as a rough comparison, both NI's Pro 53 and Steinberg's Plex take about 25 percent with 16 voices on the same system.

Overall, Lounge Lizard sounds like a collection of acoustic instruments rather than a synth, and I personally feel the extra overhead is justified. However, AAS are currently working hard on reducing CPU consumption as part of their next Tassman 3.0 release by including some processor-specific optimisations, so these improvements are likely to filter down into Lounge Lizard in due course.

Since the original SOS review AAS have released version 1.0.1 for Windows users, curing a DirectDraw initialisation error when launching Lounge Lizard as a VST Instrument inside Cubase SX and Nuendo, along with four additional packs of presets: Crystal Clean (clear and warm electric pianos), Ambient, Space (pads and atmospheres), and the incomparable Martin Walker, containing 24 of my own creations which range from vibes, gamelan, and shimmering bells, through to electric bass, banjo, and scrap metal. All presets are free downloads for registered users from www.applied-acoustics.com/loungelizard.htm.

Let's hope Lounge Lizard is the first of a new range of more refined physical modelling instruments from AAS, and that Tassman 3.0 incorporates the same dynamic voice allocation. AAS have told me that version 3.0 will amalgamate the Player and Builder into one easier-to-use application, while Instruments and their Presets will be similarly combined into single files. With a good selection of new modules, including more sequencers and filters, pitch-bend on the acoustic modules, improved Bowed and Keyboard modules, and plenty of general optimisations, this looks like good news all round. The beta version is nearly finished as I write, so the release date shouldn't be too far away.

PC Snippets     With an easy to understand display and support for many sample formats, Extreme Sample Translator is one of the cheapest ways to convert your samples. The latest version of Rightmark's Audio Analyser adds several new features to help test gear other than soundcards, such as amplifiers, full range speakers and subwoofers. Although many new processors are being released month by month, Intel's latest Pentium 4 processor is worthy of a mention, featuring a 3.06GHz clock speed and hyper-threading (see May 2002's Cutting Edge for more information). Intel claim up to 25 percent improvements when running multiple applications that support hyperthreading, and although most MIDI + Audio applications are already written to take advantage of running multiple threads, specific support should provide another significant performance boost. www.intel.com Download Accelerator Plus is an indispensable way to speed up downloads by using multiple server connections over a single Internet connection. It will also search for mirror sites to maximise download performance. I also find its recovery features a great time-saver if you get cut off, your PC crashes, or there's a power cut — it can recover a download where it left off, and the AlwaysResume feature even works with sites that don't normally support this facility. The latest version is 5.3 and includes Zip file preview features, and is available in two flavours, including a free 1.67MB download that features advertisements. However, a Premium version of DAP costs just $29.95 and disables the advertising, adds Zip extract, support for skins, and an extra acceleration rate. www.speedbit.com Extreme Sample Translator is a new browser, player, editor and manager written by Polish developer Wlodzimierz Grabowski for converting samples between various different formats, including AIFF and WAV, Giga, Soundfont, Akai S1000/3000 and Solton SND. Visually similar to CDxtract, it provides a variety of panes to display the various layers of each format's hierarchy, and claims to include ADSR, filter, and LFO parameters for more accurate conversion, along with the ability to read and write disk images. The 1.06MB demo will run for 14 days, but registration is only $15. www.extranslator.com Since I last mentioned Rightmark's excellent Audio Analyser in PC Notes December 2002, two more releases have appeared. Version 4.1 added an acoustics testing mode using a swept sine wave to test frequency response, while the latest version 4.2 adds a subwoofer test mode, a WDM drivers switch, better stability, and various other minor improvements suggested by users. http://audio.rightmark.org

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