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    ELECTRONIC ORGAN 
    CONSTRUCTORS' SOCIETY

       VIRTUAL ORGAN PROJECTS - 2
    
    Miditzer is a theatre organ and is primarily 
    designed to have the stops turned on and off 
    from an on screen display.  It is fairly simple
    to install.  It is more or less fixed as what 
    you download although you could tinker with 
    the details.
    ProgOrgan (Colin Pykett’s system) is, as 
    the name implies, fully programmable so 
    you can use it for theatre or classical music 
    and you can change the number of keyboards, 
    stops etc.  It comes with a set of sounds for 
    a fairly modest classical organ, so this would 
    be the easiest to start with.  There is no on 
    screen display, it must be fully controlled 
    by the hardware you connect to the computer.
    jOrgan (the J stands for Java which is the 
    programming language that has been used to 
    design it) looks a bit like Miditzer at first 
    glance, but is more adaptable.  It comes with 
    either theatre or classical sounds and you can 
    change or even completely redesign either system. 
    I found it quite hard to install.  Its chief 
    claim to fame is that it is the only one that 
    will run under Linux or Mac.

 
                   Another System
    
      I said there were two groups of system but the 
    second “group” has, at the moment only one 
    system available but there are two versions of it.
    The system is known as Hauptwerk and does not need 
    any particular sound card, indeed I have found it 
    work very well with the on board sound facility 
    provided on almost all computers.  However it does 
    have two factors which make it considerably more 
    expensive to implement than a SoundFont system.
    One is that it has to do all the necessary processing 
    using the computer’s CPU.  This means you must have a 
    fast modern computer. Secondly it has to have a 
    sample for every note of each stop on the organ.
    Although this does give very realistic results, 
    the amount of memory (RAM) required is considerable.  
    1 GigaBit is the minimum and for a large organ, 
    much more will be required. Still, if you have the 
    money to spend on the computer system, the software 
    itself is not too expensive (between around £60 and 
    £300) and I have heard some remarkable results.
         

    Web addresses:
    
    Miditzer:  www.theatreorgans.com/jimhenry
    
    jOrgan:  jorgan.sourceforge.net
    
    Prog Organ: www.pykett.org.uk
    
    Hauptwerk:  www.crumhorn-labs.com

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This site last updated 20th June 2007

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