History and File Format
Reality was one of the first Windows software synthesizers to gain credible professional acceptance, and since then it remains one of the tightest and versatile instruments - and it does not even exist! (That is, its software.) Since it runs in Windows, it uses the DOS disk format and uses its own file format.

Architecture Description
Reality only uses one sound file - the Bank. This holds all the contents of memory to be used at one time (similar to Emu's approach) - wavedata, parameters, setups, etc. The single Instrument unit on Reality is the Patch, and a Bank can hold 128 of these. A Patch is one Keymap, and each section of the Keymap can hold up to 4 oscillators (these can be samples or generated waveforms like sine, sawtooth, noise, etc.). All 4 oscillators share the same parameters (envelope, LFO, etc.). Patches can be combined into Patchworks which can assign up to 16 Patches to be played at one time. The initial version of Reality was called Reality 1.0 (surprise, surprise); the bank files' extension was .bnk (for Bank). The latest version of Reality is 1.5, in which they changed the file extension to .SeerMusic (hey, why not the 3 character extensions anymore???). The file format is practically identical, except for one major change - the Program chunk (which holds all the Patch data) is compressed. This was an excellent idea, since Reality has more parameters to deal with than any other sampling instrument. Parameter information compresses very easily, as well. Our problem with that was that we could not read the format!! So, Translator converts everything to .bnk format; in the future, we may be able to perform the compression and upgrade to the .SeerMusic method.

Import Formats
Reality has a comprehensive SoundFont import; in fact, they have optimized their synth engine to adapt to the envelope curves that SoundFont (or, more accurately, the EMU8000 which the SoundFont is based) implements. Reality of course imports .WAV files, which is the common method of importing wavedata. Reality stores the wavedata in the Reality file format and does not use pointers to external .WAV files.