Learning about Dimension Pro

Over the last couple of weeks I've been spending a lot of time getting to know the Dimension Pro virtual synthesizer (by Cakewalk). I purchased it a few months ago after being very impressed with the copy of Dimension LE which I received with the Proteus 2000 sound library I purchased off of Digital Sound Factory.

It's an excellent sample playback machine with some extensive modulation capabilities. It's also arranged somewhat similarly to earlier Roland digital synths so I fell right at home (having cut my teeth making patches on the JV-80). It has some really interesting single cycle waveform handling abilities and it has extensive support for the sfz multisample format. That kind of makes up for the fact that you have no interface to mapping, looping, and manipulating samples. For old school patch making that isn't really a limitation at all. It's just like working on any digital synth. Plus you get a big sound library on DVD when you purchase the Pro edition.

My little project with Dimension was basically to get all my purchased soundfonts into it. Over many episodes of the Crystal Dreams Podcast I'd been slowly driven mad by the SFZ player's instability on my dual core Intel processor. Even the commercial version (SFZ+) has the sample problem. Ableton's Sampler product doesn't fully support soundfont imports so Dimension was my only non-financial choice.

I was lucky enough to find the free edition of Chicken Systems Translator which would do about 75% of the job of converting the soundfont to the sfz file format (which is Dimension's main multisample format). There are a few errors in translation which I ended up writing a little Perl script to correct (the thought of hand editing 500 odd sfz text files was too much to bare!). So all that's left it to make the .prog files which Dimension needs for it's patch browser. It's a fairly tedious process of dropping an sfz into an empty patch and which then gets saved into the appropriate directory. For the sake of completeness I will also check the patches against the original soundfonts just to make sure no parameters have missed.

It would have been nice to have the process being completely automatic I suppose but I'm starting to realise that fully automatic sample format conversion is something that just doesn't exist. There's always something to tweak.

BUT it's a great way to get familiar with the sound libraries I'm converting. There are literally hundreds of instruments in these libraries and I almost missed a few good ones the first time around!