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391

Tracking / Re: A little dip into the old-school tracking

« on: December 14, 2008, 13:12:33 »

Sound Blasters also had a digital channel, later two for stereo. And the Ultrasound was able to play any digital sounds on its 32 hardware channels (14 at CD quality), not just a MIDI preset bank. Sound Blaster AWE cards took wavetable synthesis further by supporting soundfonts (GUS's .PAT patch format is simpler and closer to to Fasttracker II .XI instruments).

But generally you're right, that's about how it was for consumer hardware before. And you shouldn't forget the other, competing or just different machines of each era. It's interesting stuff.

Nowadays it isn't about sound cards, it's about software. When the computers themselves became powerful enough to handle sound processing while still being able to handle game graphics or application multitasking, sound hardware became less important. (And interestingly, at about the same time they were starting to outsource graphics to so called 3D accelerator display daughter boards. Later the functionality was integrated with the actual graphics adapter eventually making it one of the top-3 most important components when talking about PC performance.)

Of course hardware still matters to prosumers and musicians but keeping in canon with the thread topic, the demoscene and tracking began on consumer hardware, the most widespread machine automatically having the largest potential reserve of sceners around.

392

MilkyTracker Feature Requests / Re: MilkyTracker Portable?

« on: December 14, 2008, 12:47:07 »

Extract the MilkyTracker Windows binary archive in \PortableApps\MilkyTracker, open the PortableApps.com menu and select Options > Refresh App Icons. That's all you need. As for spreading, yeah, the PortableApps.com audience would be new audience but I dunno.. Would it belong there, how would it fit in?

393

MilkyTracker Tracks & Songs / Re: Something again

« on: December 13, 2008, 20:33:50 »

Pretty nice. Not as interesting a composition to keep me coming back, but I like the sound you're making on channels 1 and 2.

394

MilkyTracker Support / Re: Play a song just once???

« on: December 13, 2008, 20:10:17 »

I'll come looking for all of you eager writers when the wiki kicks off.

395

MilkyTracker Support / Re: editing question

« on: December 13, 2008, 20:08:29 »

The simplest solution would be to use a volume envelope that automatically fades the note. No need to attenuate the notes with pattern commands then. But for more variation and improved expression, pattern commands are the key, possibly in combination with envelopes.

396

MilkyTracker Support / Re: Play a song just once???

« on: December 13, 2008, 17:24:05 »

Ok, thought you missed them. I think I know what you mean by environmental button-reference but since we don't have one, I'll settle for making

a) a stupid comment about the fun eco stuff that comes up when you google it and
b) another, arrogant one about the buttons having labels on them.

The latter might be have some advantage over shiny icons but admittedly it's pretty retro. Maybe some day we can shower people with comprehensive docs and make them feel more comfortable and welcome. Currently "the package" caters better towards veteran users, I guess.

397

MilkyTracker Support / Re: Play a song just once???

« on: December 12, 2008, 17:25:01 »

Key reference is in the manual, F P W and L are in the FAQ.

398

Tracking / Re: A little dip into the old-school tracking

« on: December 11, 2008, 21:44:57 »

I might have led you astray by comparing the Paula to the SID. Paula is all about the samples. And I wouldn't call it synthesis really, but playback. As I understand, any actual synthesis on the Amiga would have to be software based, waveforms calculated in a program and the results routed as digital samples to Paula's channels for outputting. That's how I think AHX works. (A little help here, Amiga peeps?)

Then there's chiptunes, which might sound like the music on older, 8-bit systems, but are actually sample based modules using tiny looped sample fragments to create sound wave forms. So, chiptunes and basic synthesis on the Amiga is actually the first wave of C64 nostalgia in music. "Real" sounding digital music came first.

Goattracker integrates a SID emulation engine, so it should be pretty close to the real thing. And sure there's Amiga emulation, in form of (Win)UAE. Just like you can run a C64 music editor in a C64 emulator on the PC, you can do the same with Amiga. But most people don't feel the need to as tracking already moved on to the PC in the 1990s, Amiga emulation requires a lot of CPU power which isn't available on older comps and portable devices and using native apps just generally is a whole lot smoother.

I think you got it already, but there's no difference between custom drawn waveforms and regular samples. Drawing is just another way of creating samples, a feature copied over from Fasttracker II, one of the most popular DOS trackers.

MIDI playback on PC depended for a long time on solely the sound card. For most people this meant the Yamaha OPL FM chip on SoundBlaster and Adlib sound cards which could be compared to the Sega Mega Drive (having another Yamaha FM chip) or the previous generation mobile phone polyphonic ringtones, you know before MP3s got there too. If nothing special was done, the MIDI music would be played with an FM approximation of the General MIDI bank. Some game developers/musicians would go through the trouble of coming up with a proper music drivers for the OPL chip and programming the chip's register to create custom instrument patches and as a result, more inspired FM arrangements of the score. A good example of this is the PC version of the game Dune 2. A lot of PC game music was optimally targeted for MIDI sound modules like the MT-32 and Sound Canvas manufactured by Roland but the cheaper all-in-one consumer solution, SoundBlaster, is what most people had. As the OPL chip was the prominent music source in PCs of the first half of the 1990s, the demoscene got there too. There are plenty of trackers for that synth chip too, but that action is about programming the OPL registers and has nothing to with MIDI.

On the other hand, demoscene people got their taste of MIDI music with Wavetable synthesis when Gravis released their Ultrasound sound card and gave them away to people at demo parties. But the scene people would be more interested in the digital sound mixing that the card was able to do itself without taxing the CPU. So, soon we had demos with digital tracker music played with high sound quality and visual effects running on the screen blazing fast thanks to the sound card having taken the sound mixing load off the CPU.Wavetable synthesis is what you hear on a run-of-the-mill Windows PC today, although the default sound bank in DirectMusic (a Microsoft DirectX component handling MIDI music) is low quality and pretty effin' horrible.

Lastly, I understood you essentially asked how a musician chooses or dictates what their MIDI music sounds like. Well, they don't. As MIDI is only musical information, the sound of the playback always depends on the hardware/software setup.

399

Tracking / Re: A little dip into the old-school tracking

« on: December 11, 2008, 18:55:46 »

On the C64 you have the the SID chip, which is a synth providing noise, triangle, saw and variable width pulse waves plus you have the filters and ring modulation for that extra bit of sweetness. At first, people just straight up programmed the computer to produce tones, noises and ultimately, music. I gather the next step would be programming an actual editor for yourself to write music and finally coming up with something that would actually be usable enough for other people as well. C64 music editors have started to look more like Amiga trackers much later, after the UI style was popularized on other platforms. Before that, a typical SID editor screen would resemble (or BE) a hex editor even more.

I never had an Amiga as a kid nor did I use it back in the day, but knowing the Paula chip has its characteristics just like the SID does, and there being a butt load of these "custom format" Amiga tunes floating around the tubes, it's straightforward to assume the development progressing similarly. With a custom program and the Paula chip, you could create music from digital sounds sampled from external sources (all the rage back then, made possible by the new technology) or (probably to a greater extent) synthesize (rather than draw) your own. Trackers started from the Ultimate SoundTracker by programmer/musician Karsten Obarski and it (and the horde of hacked versions of it) then popularized the MOD format. But even then, custom players/editors could be preferred by musicians because of more comfortable UIs or improved functionality/features.

You're correct about one MIDI track sounding different on different setups. A tracker analogy would be exchanging the samples of your module on different sound cards (and that's one of the reasons why modules could compete with MIDI on the PC at all: the music sounded the same on different setups). MIDI music is created using a hardware or software sequencer, for nearly three decades already. You are correct for the last part. UnExoticA archives Amiga music, BaSS music on the Amiga is technically similar to trackers and the PC version uses MIDI tracks.

A modern tracker, while still usually capable of sample playback, is nowadays used more like a traditional sequencer (triggering and controlling external instruments and effects) or an audio package with its integrated synthesis and DSP features.

400

MilkyTracker Tracks & Songs / Re: Parallax Glacier

« on: December 11, 2008, 14:02:56 »

Thanks, all.