Why should you use Prog Organ?

The short answer is that you shouldn't if you don't want to.  There are several other excellent PC-based organ systems out there, most of them (amazingly) free, and I have no interest in comparing them with Prog Organ nor it with them.  Least of all am I interested in issues of "competition".  All systems have their strengths and weaknesses, including this one.  Prog Organ merely increases the number of systems on offer by one - and that can't be bad.  I started developing it at a time when the other offerings had either not appeared or were not very well known.  However since then, I have customised it largely to suit my own tastes and requirements as an organist of both the straight and theatre varieties, and it reached a point where I thought it might now be of interest to a wider community.

Some of its features are:

1. It uses SoundFont technology, as do some of the other systems.  Any standard sf2 SoundFont can be organised (using a SoundFont editor) so that it will work with Prog Organ.  However it also uses a special SoundFont variant specific to itself which enables it to articulate additional effects applied to the sound samples.  At one extreme you could import recorded samples of every note of every stop on a pipe organ, and in this sense the system could therefore be called a Virtual Pipe Organ.  If you prefer something less intensive so you and your family can still get a life in other respects, you can construct SoundFonts based on fewer samples and 'stretch' them across various keygroups.  SoundFont editors enable you to do this - they are not only easy to use and highly sophisticated but some are free (including the recent and latest version of Creative Labs' Vienna, version 2.4).  You do not need to make recordings of pipes with and without tremulants because the frequency and modulation facilities available within a SoundFont make it easy to construct tremulants to any desired degree of sophistication.  Of course, if you did want to record actual tremulated pipes there is nothing to prevent you doing so.

2. Once you have the SoundFonts, you can simulate any number of organs.  Each can be called up when you start the control program by specifying which of several Configuration Files is to be read.  You construct these files yourself using a simple text editor, and they tell the system (for example) which stop names correspond to which tabs or knobs at the keydesk, and where to look in the SoundFonts for their sounds.  Don't be put off by this - I supply sample SoundFonts and Configuration Files in the software package to get you going.

3. The system uses SoundFont-compatible sound cards, each of which provides 64-note polyphony and two audio output channels.  Each card will accommodate up to 32 speaking stops, of which 8 to10 can typically be used simultaneously depending on how "chord-heavy" your music is or how many couplers you are using.  An up to date PC will drive about four sound cards simultaneously, possibly more.  Bearing in mind that even the largest and most expensive commercial organs seldom use more than six or seven 64-note modules, you can see that Prog Organ  will enable you to approach or exceed that level of performance but at only a tiny fraction of their cost, even in an extreme case where you decide to use two PC's with eight cards or more to simulate very large organs.

4. From the outset I designed the system to exactly simulate organs with unified, extended, borrowed or duplexed ranks.  The key factor in such a scheme is that each simulated pipe must only sound once, regardless of how many times the player might be demanding it at the keydesk.  Thus a theatre organ can be properly simulated.

5. A blind capture-combination system is supported to avoid you having to invest in expensive motorised stop tabs or draw stops at the keydesk.  Having captured a combination, you call it up by pressing the relevant piston. A LED at the keydesk warns you that the blind combination is in use, as the stops themselves will not respond if operated by hand.  You release the blind combination by pressing a RELease piston.

6. Tremulants can be simulated to any degree of sophistication.  You can vary their characteristics in terms of amplitude and frequency modulation across a stop or rank, and you can have any number of them.  These features follow automatically from the decision to use standard SoundFont technology.

7. Small, random fluctuations are introduced into the sounds of the stops, differently for each one.  This prevents the sterile in-your-face type of sound so common with digital organs, and it simulates what happens to the sounds of real pipes while they are on speech.