This is the official FAQ list of NitroTracker. If you have additions or corrections, please post them below
Help! NitroTracker does not start!Check if you have the latest version of your card's firmware installed. Some cards have broken DLDI auto-patching mechanmisms. Try to disable auto-patching and patch NitroTracker by hand. Fixing the filesystem with fsck or scandisk, or reformating the card has helped sometimes, too.
Oh noes! The file chooser isn't displayed when opening file disk tab / I cannot load or save stuff.Make sure you patched NitroTracker with the correct DLDI patch. If your card supports auto-patching, try turning it off and patch NitroTracker manually. If it still doesn't work, check the filesystem with fsck/scandisk, or try reformating the card.
NitroTracker crashes!Check if you have the newest version. If not, update. Else,
send a bug report with reproduction steps immediately!
How can I convert my songs to MP3?First, convert your songs to .wav using either a PC tracker like MilkyTracker or using Winamp with the disk writer output plugin. Then, convert the wav file to mp3 using an mp3 encoder like lame. Here's a list of free mp3 encoders using lame.
The DS is the future of music making! What other music software is there for the DS?Oh, there's tons! Check out this list:
http://remaincalm.org/index.php/ds-music-appsWhen I load a WAV sample, rel-note finetune settings are set to seemingsly random values.OK, this is a bit unintuitive: In the XM format, samples are all saved with the same base frequency which is 8363 Hz. You cannot have samples at other frequencies, which sucks, but that's how they designed XM. So, all frequency adjustments are done via the "relative note" and "finetune" settings. Now if you load a sample at some arbitrary sampling frequency intro NitroTracker, it calculates the relative note and finetune settings such that it is played back at the original frequency even though internally it gets stored at 8386 Hz. This is confusing.
Also note that the frequency of the sound in the sample has
nothing to do with the rel. note and finetune settings. When loading a sample, NitroTracker just blindly copies it without even looking at it.
What's the maximum recording time when recording samples through the microphone?8 seconds. I'll increase this limit in the future. The sampling rate is 16384Hz and the bit rate is 16, and there's about 3MB of RAM, so in theory the maimum length of a sample can be 96 seconds.
Can I use a RAM expansion with NitroTracker?Unfortunately not. I've looked into using RAM expansions, but the DS's sound hardware cannot play back sound from Slot-2 memory expansions, which makes them pretty useless for NitroTracker. If you're close to the RAM limit, try reducing the number of samples, cutting samples, use loops in clever ways, or reduce the samples' sampling rates or bit rates using a wav editor like Audacity.
What file format must my samples be in?Your samples have to be WAV files without compression, otherwise they will not load or they will sound corrupted. For converting samples, I suggest
Audacity,
LameDropXPd (for mass-converting mp3s), or
sox for the more command-line inclined. Sampling rate does not matter and bit rate must be either 8 or 16 bit. Keep in mind that NitroTracker generates different notes by playing back samples at different sampling rates, and that an increase by one octave doubles the playback rate. The DS's hardware mixer runs at 33kHz, which means that samples above this sampling rate will be downsampled. Stereo samples are supported, but will be converted to mono upon loading. NitroTracker has about 3MB RAM available, which is the total space that your samples may use (the RAM usage of music data is negligible).
My samples sound corrupted wen I load them into NitroTracker!Have a lok at the previous question :-) Also, check the file system of your card using scandisk, fsck or disk utility.
