Velvet Studio 2.0
Introduction
Welcome into the world of exciting sound experiences and interesting, stimulating music creation! Now you have access to one of the most impressive and powerful music trackers that has ever been made. You will experience the ease and comfortability that this program provides you with, along with the huge amount of technical features making your music editing a real pleasure, as soon as you start using it. We hope that we have succeeded in creating a tool for your delighted usage and satisfactory, that will bring inspiration to your composing talent!
What is Velvet Studio?
Velvet Studio is one of many music programs called a "tracker". A tracker is a music program based on digital reproduction of analogue sounds, i.e. samples. That means that you can sample (convert from analogue to digital) any sound you like and use it in the song. Mostly you sample e.g. a bass drum and a snare drum to create the drum rhythm in your song, and not long drum loops (a sequence of drums sampled from an existing song) since they consume a vast amount of memory. This idea differs a lot from a MIDI program since they most often use pre-sampled sounds that comes from different synthesizers. The idea behind a tracker is ease of use. You don't have to know much of how music is build up using notes. You maybe know what note you want to use, and it'll be represented in an easy way e.g. C-4 which means note C on octave 4. There's also another big advantage: You don't have to own expensive equipment; your computer and sound card is all you need!
Features, features and more features. Who's got the most features? Which tracker is the best one? Well, Velvet Studio will never try to be behind its competitors. Have a look at this list of features, which is only a part of everything you can do with the program.
| Item | Description |
| Interface | Intuitive, graphical interface with pulldown menus and fully configurable keyboard shortcuts for virtually everything. Until Velvet Studio goes Win95 you will only miss the ability to move the windows! |
| Soundcard support | Supports original Soundblaster, Soundblaster Pro, Soundblaster 16, Soundblaster AWE32, Gravis Ultrasound Classic, Gravis Ultrasound MAX and Gravis Ultrasound PNP. |
| Help | Online help with hypertext links and search features. |
| Song Optimization | Removes all unused samples, instruments, channel data, commands etc etc, that occupies space in memory and on disk. Will save you a lot of space. |
| File Formats | Support for loading and saving all common formats like XM, S3M, MOD, STM, XI, PAT, SMP, IFF, WAV, etc. |
| Song Data | Allows up to 7 commands per channel on each row, up to 256 rows in each pattern, 65536 patterns and 256 instruments (with 16 samples on each instrument). All data is dynamic, meaning that each pattern can have different size, length and number of channels. |
| Instruments | Advanced instrument editor for creating more realistic sounds. Apply linear or curved waveforms to the sample volume, pitch or panpot envelope in realtime and experience your samples turning into synthesized monsters! |
| Shadow Instruments | Uses the samples from another instrument, but has its own instrument envelopes. Very handy for creating lots of different sounds, without having to use valuable sample space on your soundcard, or on disk. |
| Piano | On-screen, graphical piano that visualizes each note being played. Can be played directly with the mousepointer! |
| Sample Editor | Displays the sample envelope graphically on screen which you can zoom, scroll and playback in numerous ways. Cut/copy/paste as you like, set loop points, draw freehand, boost it or filter it. Or perhaps run a nice effect on it, like Reverb, Echo, Pitch, Delay, Robot, Flanger, Cucumber(?) and much more. Time invariant effects available, making it possible to pitch without changing the timing of the sample. Effects can be combinated to endlessly complicated new effects. |
| Sample Effect Editor | Not enough with the supplied effects? Then you can design your own effects in this advanced effect editor. You specify parameters like delay and pitch (just to mention a few) in several layers and channels to create new freaky effects. Just try it out! Virtually anything from reverse, echo and reverb to pitching flanger effects can be created. |
| Description Editor | Create your long song descriptions in the simple text editor provided, instead of destroying the sample names. Very good if you want to include a lot of information with your music. |
| Position Editor | Overview of your song in an easy editable editor. |
| Split Keyboard | Advanced split keyboard feature. Allows you to assign groups of keys to instruments, individual keys to separate samples within an instrument and a lot more. Perfect for that drumkit, or an outstanding piano instrument sampled in several octaves. |
| Echo Editor | Makes it easy to add echo-notes to your compositions. Do you think it's boring to insert all those notes with faded volume each and everywhere in every track just to make your music more reverbed? Just use the echo editor, and it will echo any track you choose, in any fashion you like. |
| Configuration | Alot of efforts has been put in configuration possibilities. There are literally zillions of different settings that you can configure to fit your needs. |
| MIDI | Have you got an external synth keyboard? If it's got a MIDI out port, just hook it to your midi interface and then you can use it for editing and playing instruments in Velvet Studio. It's never been easier to insert those complex chords in your patterns! |
Wow, this is great! But what does this incredible program cost then? Well, let's put it this way. Velvet Studio v2.0 is shareware. This means that you can get the full version absolutely for free right here at this website. However, as with all shareware, the programmers put their trust in you, and you are strongly encouraged to pay the shareware fee if you keep using the program. This also makes sure that the programmers get a small token of appreciation for their works, as well as it keeps the production team motivated.
If you've got any comments, new ideas, bugs to report or anything you can leave us an email about it, or you can write in the feedback of this website if you want everybody to read it. We reply all mail we get, and even questions written in the feedback. No problem is too small, and no feature too useless for us to consider, so don't hesitate to get in touch with us!
Sincerely,
Velvet Development
| Velvet Development | Tel: +46(0)13-171676 | Postgiro: 684514-3 |
| Att. D.Broman Hagafors |
E-mail: velvet.development@usa.net | Org.Nr. 969619-0462 |
| S-560 13 Hook | Web: velvet.home.ml.org | VAT: 06 9696190462 01 |
| Sweden |
Last Updated: 98-03-30