Banks, programs and presets

I've been studying the way patches are handled by the various soft synths, but certain things I've been unable to decifer.

I understand actual sound files, be they flac or wav files. I also get the sfz files which bring them together into multisamples.

Above these I find program files (.prog) which seem to add another level of complexity (effects, etc ?).

If I'm in a synth, say DropZone, it seems to me I should be able to load a program (.prog) from SD3, but I go looking for it with the DropZone brower, the SD3 .progs don't show up in their folder. This seems to be the case with the other synths as well. You go look in a folder that has what you're looking for, be it .sfz or .prog, and they don't show up.

Could someone (or some link) please explain what exactly are banks ?

I ask all these questions mainly because I see all these different sound files lying around and I'd like to be able to share them between all the various synths, since each synth has its strong points.

I presume the various types of sound-related files are compatible between synths ?

Finally, about the preset button that seems to be a Sonar thing that it adds to all synth windows. Does this function do something useful in all synths and if so, what exactly is it there for ?

Is all this stuff explained in Simon Cann's book Cakewalk Synthesizers: From Presets to Power User ? The index doesn't show much on banks.

This is mostly all midi stuff.

In general terms, think of a preset as a 'sound' - such as piano, or organ, etc.  These presets can be organized in one or more banks, with each bank having up to 128 presets.  It's like each preset is a file, and each bank is like a folder with up to 128 files (presets) in it - and you can have a bunch of banks (folders).

Soooooo, a real keyboard or a soft-synth would load up one 'bank' of up to 128 presets, and each preset would be like a piano, or an organ, or electric piano, etc.  

To change to each of those different sounds, you would change presets within a given bank.  You could then load a different 'bank' and you would get a different set of up to 128 presets.

The midi protocol transmits bank and preset (patch) information, allowing that information to be both recorded and subsequently sent back to a given synth for playback.  So any of those bank/preset data would be recorded into the midi track and then on playback it would send each encountered bank/preset change as a midi event back through whatever midi device is receiving the output from the playback of that midi track.

I hope I didn't further confuse you.

Bob Bone

Thanks for the help guys. I was hoping that I could at least share multisamples at the sfz level.

It seems that I could, at least between the two that I tried DropZone and SD3. BUT : Cakewalk replaced all the wav files with flac files and (I guess) patched some of the instruments to cope with that, but DropZone appears to not be one of them, at least it complains that it can't load a flac file from within an sfz file. It lets me load a flac file directly without complaining but it's 0 in size and doesn't show nor play it.

I had to edit the SD3 sfz file to get it to point to wav files instead and then DropZone will load the sfz just fine.

Further proof is that DropZone is one of the few, if not the only instrument that didn't have it's samples converted to flac files, they're all still wav files.

So I'd have to batch convert all the flac files back to wav files if I wanted to use them in DropZone.

I'm far from sure it's worth going further, for the moment I'm just exploring what I have and what I can and can't do with it. There's a lot of stuff all over the place.

I guess DropZone isn't much of a synth, but I like it's interface.

It's nice to see the waveform and the looping and start/stop settings are fun to play with to zero in on a particular part of the waveform.

wav loops show up but I've yet to get an sfz loop to show even though DropZone processes the loop commands I put in the sfz file.

All this is a lot of fun to play with, to me anyway.