12. What is the Roland Virtual Sound Canvas, and what is the difference between the VSC and VSC-DXi?

The Roland VSC (or Edirol VSC) is a software synthesizer based on Roland's highly successful hardware Sound Canvas synthesizers, the Roland SC88, SC8820, and SC8850. Basically, the VSC allows you to listen to high quality sounds without having to use a hardware MIDI module. While the sounds aren't as high quality as what you will get with the hardware module, they are a close approximation. Once you install the VSC on your computer, you can use it as a stand alone MIDI player or as your MIDI Output Driver with most PG Music Inc. applications, including Band-in-a-Box® and PowerTracks Pro Audio.

The VSC-DXi contains the same sound set as the VSC-3 (stand-alone), but it is used as a DXi (DirectX instrument) plug-in. DXi is a plug-in standard that allows software synthesizers made by any manufacturer to be used in a standard way with many different DXi host applications. The newest versions of Band-in-a-Box® and PowerTracks Pro Audio have DXi support. One advantage to using the VSC-DXi (as opposed to the VSC stand-alone version) is that it makes converting songs containing both MIDI and audio tracks to a stereo wave file, a simple one-step process. Also, if you have Band-in-a-Box® 2006 (or higher) or PowerTracks Pro Audio 10 (or higher) you can output the VSC-DXi through an ASIO driver and have almost no latency.

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Alyssa - PG Music