There are four file formats which are really useful and relevant for EWS users: TTS, TTI, 94B and 94I. There are also other file formats defined by Dream, such as 94K and 94L. Those are not really useful for the concept behind 94winst, Ed!son, Ed!son Micro and only partly for the Hoontech Editor (the formats are also invented as information for the developer of editor-software). These formats all have a different meaning.

You can divide the formats into two groups: TTS/94B and TTI/94I

The first group TTS/94B is a format for a set of samples (TTS=Terratec Set) which contains a whole bank (94B=SAM9407 Bank). It contains at least one, but theoreticaly up to 127*127 instruments  in one file (127 programs on 127 variations). At the moment the information in TTS and 94B are exactly identical. I have shown this with my TTS->94B and 94B->TTS
convertor already (http://members.aol.com/cridi).

The second group TTI/94I is a file format which includes only one  instrument (of course it can contain different samples/splits. The I stands for Instrument). This means that this file format is not bound to a program and variation number. I've never seen a TTI (will be invented with Ed!son Instrument Editor it seems) so I don't know if it will be possible to make a 100% equivalent convertor for this.

In short: One TTS/94B consists of at least one and up to theoretical 127*127 TTI or 94I files.

Reasons

Unlike 'crappy pseudo sampler cards' (like AWE series...) the EWS is not a card to edit banks and stuff with some samples and instruments in it . The EWS can and will be used as a real sampler. This means that you can edit every instrument directly if it is stored into your sampler's RAM.
This task will be performed by the Ed!son Instrument Editor. So Ed!son will primarily be a editor for one single instrument, like the 94winst-program. Ed!son will be different from the Hoontech Editor or the editors for Vienna and AWE cards. This is the main difference in the concept behind Terratec's and Guillemot/Hoontech editing. This all means that it will probably be useful for Terratec to store aditional data in the TTS file, which is not defined in 94B.
That's the reason why Terratec invented this format. Problems with filters, envelopes, clipping, portamento, splitts and so on have nothing to do with the file format. The basic parameters of the Dream are not changeable, not even by Terratec. If you have such a problem it can be firmware, software, driver, the weather, but not the file format!

Technical description

(If you're not a programmer you can skip this part )
The TTS/94B format is divided into different parts with a header each. Each header is declared with a 4 byte long RIFF-chunk. These are as follows (the file format contains a lot of pointers):

The 94I-Format is a format wich does not contain the sample (it's saved in a external file: either WAV or SMP format). I think Terratec will change this in TTI.

Conclusion

This means for us now: Ed!son Micro produces TTS files with one instrument.  So if you want to edit/use it in the future together with other instruments, it must be possible to extract (convert is the wrong word here) this single instrument into one TTI or one 94I. The 94winst-program produces 94I files, which can be combined with other 94I files into one 94B set. So if you plan to use these instruments again in the future, we either need to have the posibility to edit the 94I directly (like 94winst does) or to extract the instruments from the 94B into TTI's or 94I's. The latter option is better, because we can edit files made by other people that way. The same goes of course for wavto94i-files.

This means for us in the future: the Ed!son Instrument Editor or a part of an updated Bank-/Setmanager will need to have the feature (and I'm 100% sure it will have it) to extract single instruments from a TTS and a 94B into at least TTI and maybe even 94I to be able to edit it.

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Latest update on page: 08-02-99