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Basically this program was originally for people with older, FM-based soundcards to allow them to simulate the behavious of more advanced wavetable cards.The program takes your MIDI files and plays samples via your wave output, bypassing the synthesizer completely and producing rather nice tones.
But, I hear you say, I have a nice wavetable card - an AWE32 for example, or a nice Yamaha.Why would I want to waste CPU cycles on translating from MIDI to sound?
Well the answer is simple - it's because the program uses the wave output. It means your synth is totally free for other things, such as playing extra notes!
With a half-decent processor (my 6x86 is reported as 177% capable of playing at top-notch level), you can belt out 48-voice polyphony from a SB16, or a whopping great 96 voices from a Soundblaster 64.
This potential, however, isn't obvious to access.The program tells you you can make a Windows device-driver from Wingroove. Now that's not always going to be useful - you don't want to waste all that processing-time when you're Duking it up or whatever, so I wouldn't recommend it for overall Windows use. Go into Cakewalk, however, and the device-driver comes into its own.
Get Wingroove to make the Device Driver, and then restart your PC and change back to your old MIDI driver in Control Panel. It's not hard - I have an old ESS Audiodrive 1868, and it produces two drivers for MIDI plus the obligatory MIDI-Mapper which Windows supplies. Just check which driver you're using to start off with - back up your registry if you're feeling anally retentive, and then get Wingroove to make its own driver. (This is found in the settings options menu as a simple checkbox.)
Tell your computer to restart, and then immediately return to your former driver. This will prevent any loss of performance/speed for games.
Next open up your copy of Cakewalk.Get it first if you haven't already - it's well worth having.
For each track you write in Cakewalk there will be a 'Port' setting. This can be default-1 or default-2. This refers to your top two choices of device-driver.
To set up Wingroove as one of these, go into the MIDI device options and find your MIDI-output drivers. Your native soundcard driver will probably be the main default, possibly followed by MIDI-Mapper. Wingroove will have appeared bottom of the list. Use the buttons+controls on the screen to raise it to second place and it will be seen as your secondary default driver for MIDI.
This won't affect Windows at all - just the tracks in Cakewalk which use default-2 as their port of choice.
Now compose/arrange away as usual, and you have all your old channels for your 'port 1' driver, which talks to your FM or wavetable synth, and 16 new channels with a total of 32 voices free to use as 'port 2', which talks to your wave audio.
Now clearly you can't use any waveforms whilst the port-2 MIDI is playing without losing a lot of quality and synchronisation.(It should be fine for bits with only the synth playing as normal.)
But for notes-only MIDI passages, you will have up to 96 voices without buying a second soundcard.
(Of course, if you have a Yamaha with wave audio and an SB64 PCI or something then you will have anything up to 160 voices, all wavetable!!!)
So the idea of a high-level software device-driver aimed at older soundcards on your state-of-the-art AWM card isn't so silly after all. Anyone who thought they didn't need Wingroove, think again - it's the best way of automating the co-ordination of MIDI and wave-audio, and expanding your overall MIDI performance without spending any money.(Apart from buying the program, that is.)
God, I could rave on about this all night!
