DJEMBE-L SOFTWARE DOWNLOADS FOR SOUND RECORDING

©® Drums.org Texas Drums DrumStore Drum Books WebManager HOME Advertise with US		Drums Not Guns African Drum Circles Dance Teachers USA Drum Teachers USA Study Camps Africa Study Trips European Drum Teachers Links Glossary

For Mac-users out there, there is a limited but handy shareware (10/99)
program out there, Virtual Drummer (try places like www.shareware.com, www.download.com) which is useful in a similar way (never gets tired, doubles as a box notation ....).
A (fully commercial) program called Vocalwriter is another Mac program
which appears to be about a thousand times as powerful
Virtual Drummer (mac) to file(6/98)
Different beat patterns. Download it completely free!
Windows version will be available second half of 98.

MORE FOR MAC-USERS (From: ogawa@teleport.com) (11/99)

The writer has been evaluating software (uses MacOS) for the purpose of preparing MIDI files of various West African rhythms. He's posting here to ask for help finding software that is better than what he has have found so far.

Having used both Lime (shareware, mailto:lime@uiuc.edu) and EasyBeat (commercial, mailto:easybeat@unisoftwareplus.com). For all their good points, both programs have the same limitation: they make it difficult to achieve what his teacher calls "the correct feeling" ("swing").

As you experienced drummers know of course, swing is an essential element in the feeling of a song. When preparing a score on the computer, the effect can be achieved by slightly delaying the second of two eighth notes. The precise amount of the delay is crucial: too much and you get a dotted rhythm (it sounds like a John Phillip Souza march), too little and the beat is entirely even: no swing
(and "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing").

With Yankadi, you can write music and rhythms, play the rhythms, practice your own part against (or with) the computer, and listen to rhythms to learn them!
Yankadi features summary
Yankadi allows you to write music and rhythms, print the music, copy it to the clipboard and paste it into other programs like Word, or even create web-pages with rhythms, all from the program itself.

Writing music can be done by actually typing the notes, or you can use the palette: simply click a button to insert a note. There are many handy features for managing scores, lines and music parts.

You can also let the computer play the music: play djembe parts, doundoun parts, bells etc. together at the same time, and practice your own parts together with the computer. Yankadi has an 8-channel mixer with volume, pitch and pan (balance) controls, beats-per-minute controls for really slow practice, and an attaque setting to hear accented beats louder, and so on.

Mellosoftron (9/99)
It can be downloaded at http://www.polyhedric.com together with
a player called the Midinight express. The nice thing about the Mellosoftron software is that you can map whatever set of self produced wav files under whatever set of keys from your MIDI keyboard
Then you play your Djembe or Dunun (or balafon,...) with the CONSERVATION OF FEEL (not possible with Sound Club) on your keyboard, hearing the real sounds while you are playing. The resulting MIDI-file's are very small so, ideal for distibution on Internet You need the player when you want to hear the MIDI files produced with Mellosoftron Figuring out how it all works is more difficult compared to "Sound Club" used by Paul Nas for example, but there are also important advantages :
1. Feel is conserved when playing on your MIDI-keyboard
2. The actual Sound(MIDI) files are much smaller ( 10 kB for 4 minutes or so)

All In Wonder 128 graphic card which accepts video in and creates MPEG 1 and other Video for Windows video files. Create short clips demonstrating the techniques of playing balafon and drums. MPEG 1 files are small and therefore are very efficient for emailing to other people or even streaming from a WEB site. There's a product called VCDCutter that allows you edit your MPEG files. It's very inexpensive at $20!

The new version (2.1) of Notation Playback is now available for free downloading at www.djembe.net From Lennart Hallstrom. There is also a new service called "Notation Playback Rhythm Exchange", where NP 2.1 users can upload & download NP export files. (11/99)

SlowGold: slows down any music with amazing sound quality, while keeping the original pitch. With SlowGold, the greatest musical treasures of all time are already waiting in your CD collection. http://www.slowgold.com/ (10/99)

Font Foundry: Welcome to the Font Foundry. We understand that type remains an integral part of design, that's why we have one of the largest collections of freeware and shareware fonts available. The Font Foundry provides high quality type by skilled designers, including insights into the background of typography and elements of design. We appreciate your feedback regarding bugs and suggestions. (10/99) http://www.fontfoundry.com/

Self-Recorded Djembe Sounds - From: Jan Verhaert uncleblues@usa.net who has developed a FREE handy little program that can generate rhythms with self-recorded djembe sounds. (so no midi-disaster-sound). Download it at http://users.pandora.be/jv/percgen/jvpgl-en.exe