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541

MilkyTracker Community / Re: absolute beginner!

« on: August 05, 2008, 10:33:27 »

There's a lot of reading available in the Documentation section of our website but there aren't any quick newbie tutorials at the moment. If you want to learn to use MilkyTracker by studying the theory, you should probably read the Tracker's Handbook, then the Fasttracker II manual (without getting stuck in the UI specifics because it's a little different from MT) and finally the MilkyTracker manual.

The other way is to just download a whole bunch of modules and look at them play while finding out what is doing what. Most of us old farts started like this 10 - 20 years ago. This trend of tutorials and reading is a little foreign to us but maybe a combination of these ways will effectively give you an understanding of things.

About samples.. since you're not new to producing music, look at it like this: They're everywhere. Sure you can find places to download samples, but you can probably just make them yourself. Use VSTis and render wavs from your host app, load the wavs up in MilkyTracker, cut them up and resample to fit your limitations. That way you get the sounds you want, right?

You should know that a 4ch MOD is a particularly challenging first project. While you can write those in MilkyTracker, it was made to be a clone of the more advanced Fasttracker II so there are more features available than you can use in a MOD file. These are:

• Pattern length is exactly 64 rows
• You can only use octaves 3, 4 and 5 when writing the music
• Volume column is not used
• Only effect commands 0 - 9 and A - F are used
• All instruments have to have the relative note value of C-4
• There is no KeyOff-note in MODs
• Instrument envelopes and auto-vibrato aren't used

Feel free to ask more specific questions when you're there. I'm not trying to scare you away with this stuff but I think it's good for you to know you've got your work cut out for you. Hopefully it isn't too much and your project is successful.

542

Wanted: Music for Projects / Re: Newbie needs to create 4 channel MOD

« on: August 05, 2008, 01:38:38 »

MilkyTracker would work for you as it has pretty good ProTracker compatibility but that's really not the issue as the music isn't going to be played on Amiga but on cell phones. "Easiest" is subjective. A Windows GUI based tracker could be easier for some, but you get essentially the same effect by switching MilkyTracker into the MilkyTracker edit mode which makes the UI focus based and gives you modern standard clipboard shortcuts for example. It cannot import MIDI files though. Open ModPlug Tracker might help you with that. But that's all subsidiary because you are not going to produce a quality module file by converting a MIDI file. A ProTracker module is a seriously limited medium and making it sound good requires hard manual work.

The 100k is not a problem, but "incredible" is again subjective. You need to understand how a module file works. Even if MilkyTracker supported VSTi, it would only help if cell phones supported VSTi as well. You're not rendering a wave file and compressing that like with MP3. The .MOD player (in the cell phone) creates a similar environment for playing back the music as you use in a tracker when composing it. A module file stores note and effect data like a MIDI file but also contains the sound samples which act as instruments. When the module is played back, those samples are played and mixed in real-time according to what's written on the module patterns.

The durations you mention don't matter much because this isn't streaming audio. You can have a module and have it take up some kilobytes, but when you say, slow it down to quarter of the original speed, that only means changing song parameters and the file will take up equal amount of space as the original. With streamed audio the result would be quadruple.

How do I get great sounding instruments into such a tiny file?

Let's put this in proportions: The ProTracker module format is roughly 20 years old. The bit-depth for samples is 8. Sampling resolution doesn't matter as the idea of the format is to play back samples at different rates to create music. (By default you can't compress the samples either, however it's possible for your programmer to pull it off because the sound decompression needs to exist in the cell phone.)

So by today's standards, there's no way to do this. If you're willing to lower your standards though, you can fit a lot in 100k. One way out of this is going chiptune, using instruments that sample for example one cycle of a basic waveform like square, sine, triangle or saw. Very basic, but it gives you, space-efficiently, instruments that sound like old computers and game consoles, which is what all the hip kids are into. Combine that with some snappy percussion samples and whatever and you might very well have a stylish retro-induced music piece in your hands, ready for submission.

Here's the real space saving tip:
If you need to have three pieces of music like in your example and you are going to use pretty much the same instruments for all of them, don't make three separate modules because that leaves you with three 33k limitations to work with. Instead, make one module that has all the three parts separated as subsongs. That way you won't be wasting space on the same samples several times and you can have more and/or better quality ones in the single module file. This is done with loop commands.

Code: [Select]

Intro: starts at the beginning of the module, a.k.a. Order 00
.
. The song progresses
.
. And reaches its end on say, Order 04.
On the Pattern at Order 04, you insert the command B00 which sends the playback back to Order 00. Voilà, you have a looping intro music sequence.

After that you continue by writing the Win song starting from Order 05. If you don't want this tune to be repeated but only played once, you can trap the playback on an empty, silent pattern.

Code: [Select]

Win: starts on Order 05
.
. and it's a short one in this example and it finishes on Order 07 already.
. A silent pattern follows the music on Order 08.

On the pattern at Order 08 you can set a loop to itself, B08, which prevents the playback from playing the Win music again, or any of the other parts until a game state triggers playback on another Order.

All of this subsong stuff should be discussed with the programmer because it's not going to work automatically. The programmer has to become involved with the music replay enough to be able to jump song positions based on the happenings in the game. It may not sound that attractive but the advantage (especially when working with tight size limits) is too great to ignore without consideration. (I know, I've once successfully convinced a producer of this exact thing.)

543

MilkyTracker Tracks & Songs / Re: It's Now or Never; Jason's Song.

« on: August 04, 2008, 02:58:17 »

Hi Rex, and welcome.

Not bad at all for a first, don't stop here. There's a pattern in newbie chiptunes: The 0xy arpeggio effect gets instant results that sound a little like old video games but using it without planning the actual chords it produces can easily lead to dissonance. It's not THAT bad here but there's some. On the positive side, I think you've got just enough variation to last the duration of the song, which makes it a nice little tune. The rhythm is also solid, not just crazy random stabs here and there, which I think is very important.

I thought about writing something about hexadecimal numbers in here but maybe it's a little too soon. We'll see about that when you've posted a couple of more songs, or if you're feeling adventurous, go ahead and read up on that.

544

Bug Reports / Re: bug: IT with patterns > 256 rows are not accepted...

« on: August 02, 2008, 16:51:46 »

thank you for you 'fastness' (sorry if the word isn't correct)... answers are made quickly on this forum 

There's a bunch of us regulars lurking in the forums throughout the day just waiting, fingers itching, to jump in and reply to posts. But it seems that although the site (and the forum) gets a lot of traffic daily, a very small percentage of visitors (have the courage to?) post anything.

545

MilkyTracker Community / Re: anyone know when the GP2X F200 Touchscreen Navigation Issue will be fixed?

« on: July 29, 2008, 13:52:25 »

What's wrong is the clicks are interpreted as right-clicks, and why it's taking so long is there is no such thing as a GP2x MilkyTracker team. In fact, nobody in the MilkyTracker team has a GP2x. We could use a hand with this, but the last time we checked, the GP2x community wasn't into the F200 that much.

546

The Lobby / Re: XM vs IT

« on: July 27, 2008, 20:16:19 »

It's a common misconception that FT2 was mouse driven. While working, there's practically a keyboard shortcut for everything and experienced musicians hardly use the mouse. But the fact that you can ALSO do more things with the mouse probably made it more accessible to beginners.

547

MilkyTracker Community / Re: Very Basic Question

« on: July 25, 2008, 00:00:15 »

A sustained sample without a volume envelope will play endlessly, that's what you're essentially telling it to do. So yeah, make an envelope to play short notes that die automatically. But for more expression, you need to stop those notes manually so you can have different length notes.

548

MilkyTracker Tracks & Songs / Re: Re.Writeable - Mynes

« on: July 24, 2008, 16:48:46 »

I must have been thinking about some other module while writing that. Sounds like my common complaint for newbie chiptunes. They're not that bad here, maybe a little variation is missing. Especially the track with the constant 007 could use some color but there's nothing I could point out like "there, that's wrong, it should be like this" so forget about it.

And please, call me raina.

549

MilkyTracker Community / Re: Very Basic Question

« on: July 24, 2008, 16:23:47 »

Sounds like your sample is looped, would disabling loop help at all?

550

NitroTracker Tracks & Songs / Re: Songs made using only your voice :D

« on: July 21, 2008, 16:20:55 »

and that's a very original take on the Super Mario World theme.