Author Topic: Strike Module Quick Instruments  (Read 548 times)

Offline Den

Strike Module Quick Instruments
« on: April 11, 2021, 08:21:06 AM »
i have recently bought a Strike Module and have set up 164 Quick Instruments. Whilst doing this I made some interesting discoveries.
The module creates another voice WAV file with the suffix 1. This file is the one that the module "plays" and it is not necessary to keep your original file on the SD Card. All that the quick Instrument .sin file does is point the module to the filename with the number 1 suffix. It does not matter if you later decide to change the voice of that file, just do not change the filename.
Whilst creating these Quick Instruments, although the Strike Editor User Guide recommends a 48 kHz sampling rate for the wav files I used 44.1 kHz files. Some way through setting up the Quick Instruments I received a warning message saying the wav file I was loading was not a valid one. This message was followed by another file had been successfully converted. This happened with 10 of my files. When I came to set up a user kit that used these 10 files I received a message that said that these files were Incompatible Data. Changing the sample rate of the wav files used on the SD card to 48 kHz solved this problem.
I have since imported all of the 44.1 kHz files into Audacity in bulk, changed the Audacity Project Rate value to 48000 and used the Export Multiple option.

Offline Chaser

Re: Strike Module Quick Instruments
« Reply #1 on: April 11, 2021, 11:01:32 AM »
i have recently bought a Strike Module and have set up 164 Quick Instruments. Whilst doing this I made some interesting discoveries.
The module creates another voice WAV file with the suffix 1. This file is the one that the module "plays" and it is not necessary to keep your original file on the SD Card. All that the quick Instrument .sin file does is point the module to the filename with the number 1 suffix. It does not matter if you later decide to change the voice of that file, just do not change the filename.
Whilst creating these Quick Instruments, although the Strike Editor User Guide recommends a 48 kHz sampling rate for the wav files I used 44.1 kHz files. Some way through setting up the Quick Instruments I received a warning message saying the wav file I was loading was not a valid one. This message was followed by another file had been successfully converted. This happened with 10 of my files. When I came to set up a user kit that used these 10 files I received a message that said that these files were Incompatible Data. Changing the sample rate of the wav files used on the SD card to 48 kHz solved this problem.
I have since imported all of the 44.1 kHz files into Audacity in bulk, changed the Audacity Project Rate value to 48000 and used the Export Multiple option.

It may have been the samples themselves..."up sampling" 44.1 to 48 doesn't do much of anything,especially for the quality,it just makes the sample footprint larger..
I can confirm that a majority of the Factory set is 44.1Khz...actually it's a mess....some are 16/44 mono..some are 16/44 stereo..some are  16/48 mono and 16/48 stereo..some are 24/44 mono..24/48 stereo..there are even 32 bit kits..
The Database was slapped together,more than likely because of deadlines etc.Going by the sample dates etc,it started as an organized structure..then over time different approaches were introduced and as it gets to the current Database complete kits/samples were thrown into individual folders.

I remixed/resampled the entire Database well over a year ago...trimmed the tails (removed up to 7-9 seconds of silence after the fade)
and Mono summed to 16/44...no problems at all..(Data base reduced by 31%..attached)

The result was as expected ..the kits are less than 1/2 size and load extremely fast and more importantly allow you to use the 2nd layer  so you can layer different kits.
Currently the majority of the kits max out at 200 mb and use only one layer.
(comparison attached).
The sample(s) file you used may also be corrupt (from download etc) or were not encoded correctly by the software that created it.(or had other embedded..MIDI )
Did you try just running the same sample through Audacity and not changing anything?..There may be a glitch in the Quick Instrument process
in the Editor.The Quick Instrument is the only process that converts it's own sample.(The STRIKE Multipad does similar and renames/stores it for it's OS).
The STRIKE Editor hasn't been updated since around v1.2 of the Module software.
There hasn't been a STRIKE Module update since Nov 2019 (STRIKE PRO SE Released).

Alesis also has a sampler converter for mono wav that fixed a lot of those problems for some of the earlier hardware.

Example (From Alesis)
We created a sample by recording into a Tascam handheld recorder as 16-bit, 44.1KHz Mono WAV file. We then copied the recorded file to the computer, and from there copied the file to another SD card for use in the SamplePad. When the SamplePad tried to read the file, it displayed an Invalid Format/Incompatible error. It seems that in this case, the recorder did not encode the file as needed.

Solution
We used the Free Audio Converter utility to re-encode the file into another 16-bit, 44.1KHz Mono WAV file.
This new file loaded into the SamplePad and triggered perfectly...

Offline Den

Re: Strike Module Quick Instruments
« Reply #2 on: April 11, 2021, 12:29:55 PM »
Hi Chaser,
I did try the files in Audacity and also Wavepad Sound Editor, after the Strike module returned the Incompatible Data message, to see if they played and they did. I do have the Alesis Converter but I didn't run them through it first, before I upsampled them, to see if they would then work with the Strike module.
A few questions.
How did you get at the internal samples to resample/remix them?
Why did you mono sum them?
What type of sample does Quick Instrument process convert to?