planet Z

Sent: Friday, May 19, 2000 1:34 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [pulsar-scope] some words about our new products

Here is some more information about our new products and how to integrate them into your Pulsar system.

Modular concepts have many advantages. The Pulsar software with all the devices and modules is an example of a modular software approach. With our new products we make the hardware much more modular, too.

The idea is that each product works as a stand-alone unit. Let's say you buy a PowerSampler as your only CreamWare product, then you have a sampler and an audio card which can be used with any sequencer in any PC. Elektra is a modular synth plus the audio card, Luna is for the one looking mainly for an IO/mixing solution.

At the same time - as all products are members of the same family, let's call it SCOPE technology - you can combine them in any way. This means as Pulsar user you can add e.g. a PowerSampler, but in this case you will not use it as stand-alone device, but rather as expansion of your Pulsar system. The DSP power is added, same with the IOs, and also the devices (STS3000, PS mixer). There will be respective modules (PS analog source/dest etc. in Hardware Devices, STS3000 in Devices etc) which can simply be loaded into the Pulsar project.

Now you can combine boards with 4 or 6 DSPs (Pulsar) with the ones with 3 DSPs (Luna, PS, Elektra) or with the ones with 15 DSPs in any combination. In all cases you have access to the total DSP power and IOs from your Pulsar environment. Only restriction at the moment: don't use more than three boards in total.

To be even more flexible and modular, the IOs of the new Pulsar II board are placed on a daughterboard that is sandwiched to the Pulsar board. This means soon you also have the choice to add IOs to a Pulsar II SRB later, to replace the IO board with another one, or buy Pulsar with the IO combination you want.

We also decided to make the software packages more modular. This means a Luna user can buy the Pulsar software to upgrade to Pulsar, or a Pulsar user can buy the SCOPE /SP software. A Luna user can expand his original system up to the complete SCOPE, without throwing away anything he bought so far.

Basically our product range becomes a big modular kit system, you have all the choice to add what you want any time, no matter if you start with a Pulsar, Luna or SCOPE.

Some here mentioned they are afraid that with all the new products, we might focus on other things than Pulsar. If you get the overall picture, you will understand that there is no need for this fear, in the contrary: As all products are members of the same family, they share the same architecture (on the hardware and software side). Improving the ASIO driver of PowerSampler means to improve the ASIO driver of Pulsar, a new Gigasampler interface for PowerSampler resulted in one for Pulsar, features of the SCOPE system can easily be added to future Pulsar versions, and so on.

Hope some things are clearer now and you like the idea behind it,

best,

Ingo,
CreamWare