Our ChipChat Sound Cards are excellent cards, and come with a 90 day warranty and 30 day money back guarantee, along with support. These are "Sound Blaster Compatible" with DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows95, WindowsNT, and OS/2 software drivers. We are not able to offer these cards at a lower price, except for quantity orders. Look at the ChipChat Direct web page for current pricing.
The ChipChat Sound Card 32 is the same card as the ChipChat Sound Card 16. The '32' has an extra board attached to it to provide 'wavetable' support.
The software in your computer will ask the Sound Card to play two different types of sound files: .WAV and .MID (.MIDI) files.
The .WAV files are "Wave files" and are the digital equivalent of a tape recording. These .WAV files can be sounds of anything: sound-effects, people talking, animals grunting, birds chirping, waves crashing, and music. The ChipChat Sound Card 16 and the 32 will play these .WAV files in an identical manner - there is no difference between the two. Music recorded as a .WAV file results in a much larger file than the same music recorded as a MIDI file.
The .MID (MIDI = Musical Industry Digital Interface) files are the digital equivalent of "sheet music". Sheet Music only applies to instruments, and the same is true of MIDI files. A MIDI file might contain instructions similar to "Trombone, Middle-C, Loudness=100, Length=3.0 seconds". This is where the two sound cards behave differently.
The ChipChat Sound-16 is not a trombone, so it must 'synthesize' the sound of a trombone from mathematical formulas. Since the Sound-16 is not a "super-computer" it cannot do enough calculations fast enough to sound like a real trombone. The result is a "synthesized trombone" sound. This sounds 'fuzzier' than a real trombone.
The ChipChat Sound-32 is not a trombone either, but it has this 'wavetable' attached to it. The music industry has digitally captured the sounds of actual instruments, 128 of them, and stored them in a computer chip. In this chip (which is on the 'wavetable' card on the ChipChat Sound-32) there are digital sounds of trombones, flutes, clarinets, drums, bagpipes, etc. The ChipChat Sound-32 does not need to synthesize the sound of a trombone. It looks up the "trombone digital wave" in the "table of waves" (wavetable) on the wavetable card. It then plays a trombone sound which really does sound like a trombone.
Yes!
The '16' can be upgraded to the '32' with the addition of the wavetable, so if you buy the '16' today you can upgrade to the '32' later.
The software drivers are available for download from the ChipChat Web Page. (Coming Soon)
ChipChat Sound Card Documentation is available online, in HTML format. (Coming Soon)
The wavetable is created by digitally sampling a single note from an instrument. When other notes are played, the wavetable scales the sampled note up or down.
The bagpipe is unlike other musical instruments in that it produces several notes simultaneously. The Great Highland Bagpipe of Scotland has a chanter from which the melody is played, two tenor drones which sounds a constant tone one octave below low-A on the chanter, and a single bass drone which sounds a constant tone two octaves below low-A.
If you sample a single note from a bagpipe you will sample the chanter and the drones. When you scale that note up or down you will also be scaling the drones up or down, which is not correct! That is why bagpipe music on the wavetable sounds strange.
At ChipChat, Marty, Scott, Tyge, Dean, and Clifford are all brothers who play the bagpipes. We alerted Yamaha, the company that originally did the wavetable about this problem and a suggested fix. It is documented in the wavetable technical documentation.
Marty Cawthon Last modified: Fri May 14 23:26:43 GMT 1999