Hey ezr7171,
Thanks for your post in this thread and your interest in this whole topic concerning our almost ancient DM-10:-)
Firstly, haven't lost interest in researching but didn't have so much time for it recently and simply had to switch to "play-mode" on my DM-10.
Shurely I'm interested in teaming-up for results but don't have the plan to make it all available generally in public.
Not primarily because of the mentioned low response or because of the upcoming new hardware but firstly because knowing my solutions are not usable commonly and could not lead to some sort of software or anything.
I was wondering about how little interest I gained in the community in general when i posted my project (-nobody seemed to have picked up those promising efforts again ever since a first effort back in 2014 and nobody even asked for sound-samples or anything. Perhaps because everybody is exited of the announced Strike kits or simply use EZ Drummer instead of the original sounds now???
So we're more or less on our own now it seems ...
As I mentioned there existed a group of drummers here who tried to go the same route but the whole project ended suddenly even though one of them claimed to be ready to offer modified sound-roms ("DM10 file formats (warning/ technical!)"). Sadly I was not able to get in touch with the participants when I started on my own about 2 years ago,
evaluating mostly trial-and-error with the help of a programmer here.
For all of you interested or those who already digged into the process of exchanging files, you'll find a short part out of a list of wav files inside the drum module ass an attachment, just to explain into which problems I ran very soon (-and probably everyone will as long as the, let's call it DNA, of the sound-roms is not found out).
Starting with file number 399: You can see the wav number, the calculated starting- and end-point of the file (-but all those are wrong due to a mis-calculation! I had to find them for each file individually..), the offset and finally the assumed tom-sound you will hear each file in when you play.
Just imagine the bunch of files building one drum sound together, with different velocities, PAN R / L,... stagged together like a pyramid turned upside-down: The first dynamic below, second dynamic on top of it, proceeding upwards every file being a bit longer for the size and longer decay of the sound.
BUT: Most of the sounds are mixtures of the others spread out all over the sound-rom in a kind of random order, no folder structures!...a clicking sound for the rim-shot on the snare for example forms the rim sound on a tom,too and heavily gated it is part of a rim-click on another snare at the same time. A cut-off tom sound forms the attack on a bass-drum and so on...
The parts of the pyramid are not spread-out in successive order, too, sometimes in reversed lenghts and so on. Hitting a cymbal for example means you hear long files with lots of sustain on the first dynamic level enriched by shorter attack sounds when playing a crescendo...no general outline for all of the instruments at all
...Back to my example file number 404: The biggest problem besides finding out which file is used in which dynamic level of what ever instrument is to figure out where you can load a all parts of new sound into. "WAHAN 5.Dyn." means I replaced the existing wav file with a sound of a 10" WAHAN tom on a 6th dynamic level, panned to the left, directly after you can see in which other tom sounds it will be audible, too, or- put another way which other tom files you loose in this process. Getting the point?
Just take the time to skip through an instrument folder and compare the sounds you hear when you through them.
Start with the Tom sound folder: I state that there only exist up to 3 DIFFERENT sounds with usable velocity depth and size for each instrument!
So which sounds do you want to use instead the originals, anyway?
- I came to the conclusion that it is a tough fight to beat the original Alesis sounds with a reasonable effort. Even though they are not good enough for playing live they still appear to be a good compromise of quite many sounds over all, a -call it reasonable- quality and the rather small size fitting the short memory of our module.
What makes an instrument sound lively, rich, coloured and musical?
Ambience, ring, long decay, layers!...all that means boosting sizes and running short of memory with the DM-10.
I intended to merge the best sounds of BlueJay, the original rom and EZ Drummer sounds into one rom but ended up with muted cymbals and toms, too!
And besides this fact I just couldn't find a library containing all the sounds we really need. The original BJ library lacks half-open HH and Chinas, too...(besides sacrificing a few dynamic levels for bigger file sizes), EZ has not more than 2 HiHat-openings at all, even Simon Phillips offers no Side-Snare sounds or Snares with the wires off!
I ended up sampling my whole acoustic kit in the end.
Let me point out again that I'm still not able to change the sound formats or architectures of the roms nor have I decoded the full DNA of them (-and I'm more and more certain that it can't be done with reverse engineering as long as no inside information about the roms is provided to us) nor can I provide any secure information about each element forming an audible instrument sound or each specific format of the elements.
So even though I claim to have successfully compiled 2 different sound-roms beating the Crimson kit and even most of what I've heard of the upcoming Strike kit, too there are a few bottle-necks that need to be considered nearly unchangeable, except you want to use 2 modules and heavily improve your hardware, too.
...But if you think you can dig deeper into the roms or know how to re-flash eproms and tweak start-up sequences, we'll enter a real new level!
My problems in this stage now is quite software-related, because I intend to tweak the tiny boot and trigger roms.
Perhaps this gets too detailed here very soon and we should get in contact via PM?
...Hmmm, quite a long post now but i hope this helps to clear it up for you all what it's all about here.
Just keep on drumming folks!!!!
Tim.