OAS / OAX Sound Demo – Introduction

While we are on the topic of sound demos Bill came up with a great idea. Turns out that OAS ships with a few demo MIDI files. Bill took the time to record those files on OAS and sent me both the MIDI and the WAV files that he recorded. There are a total of 17 tunes. Those of you with OAS instruments should recognize them?

1. Achy Breaky Heart.mid
2. Air.mid
3. Amazing Grace.mid
4. Ambobpolka.mid
5. Amorada.mid
6. Anglo Polka.mid
7. Axel F.mid
8. Biscya.mid
9. Chatanooga Choo Choo.mid
10. Cracy Mozart.mid
11. Happy Music.mid
12. Java.mid
13. Samba Ole.mid
14. Tico Tico.mid
15. Time is Tight.mid
16. Time to Say Goodbye.mid
17. Wonderful World.mid

Over the next week or two, we are going to record those MIDI files on our Sonic and we will upload both the OAS and OAX versions for folks to listen/compare them.

Two differences we need to work though. The first one Bill mentioned in his note to me. OAS doesn’t normalize the wav file unless you purchased the multi-track recorder feature. OAX does so that means there is a pretty big difference in the volume level of the two files. We can fix that in Logic.

Let me show you what that looks like. Track 1 is what the wav file from OAS looks like after importing into Logic. As you can see track 2 (the same recording but done on OAX) looks quite a bit different.

The other thing we noticed when we played a few of the MIDI files on OAX was the overall balance of some of the sounds is a little off. For example in the test file above (Air.mid), the string track on OAX is way too loud. So I’m going to make a few minor adjustments to the overall mix on OAX, and also run the OAS wav files through a process in Logic to normalize them. Here’s what that will look AFTER the OAS version has been normalized. As you can see now the overall volume level of the OAS recording (on top) is much closer to the OAX version.

I’ll start getting them posted in the next few days.