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Playback of virtual instruments - Interrupted sound

According to the number of instruments playing together and the density of notes in the score, the processing power of a given computer may not be enough to play it all in real time. To avoid this problem, Pizzicato has a buffered playback function. This means that the sound of measures may be computed by Pizzicato in the background and stored in memory buffers. When Pizzicato plays the score, it plays the measures back from the buffers. You can in fact combine real time playing with buffered playing and select which instruments play in real time or not. You can of course also combine these virtual instruments with standard MIDI instruments.

Even if your computer is slow and does not have too much memory, you will be able to create an audio WAV file with the quality of the sound library. In future versions of Pizzicato, we will work on the speed and optimization of the audio playback functions in real time, so that more and more computers will be able to play all instruments in real time.

To select the audio playing mode, click on the "..." button in the score window tool bar. The dialog that appears show a popup menu called Audio playing mode. This menu has three possible choices:

Audio playing per measure - In this mode, Pizzicato will prepare the playback sound and store it in a memory buffer. This preparation is done for each measure of the full score. This mode may sometimes take a few seconds before the score starts to play, as Pizzicato must prepare at least the first measure before starting to play. While playing measure 1, it already computes measure 2, and so on. In this mode, it is the preparation of the audio buffers that take much processor time. Playing the buffers does not take many processing power.

Real time audio play - In this mode, Pizzicato creates the sound in real time, as notes are played. When several instruments are played together with much notes, your computer processor may not be enough at some point to make the sound continuous. In case you hear a jerky or interrupted sound, you should use the first mode, with audio buffers per measure. You can also remove one or more virtual instruments and use their MIDI equivalence that will not need so much power.

Play all in MIDI - In this mode, the virtual instruments are simply ignored. They are not deleted from the score, but Pizzicato plays all staves with the MIDI synthesizer. You can use this mode for instance when the sound is irregular with the real time mode or if Pizzicato is too slow while playing with audio buffers. This may for instance be the case for large orchestral scores. You can work them with MIDI and when the score is ready you can export it to a WAV audio file in good sound quality.