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Tracking / Bug/feature/taste? S3M Offset without new note
« on: October 24, 2018, 15:23:38 »
Hi.
A long, long time ago ... when there were landline mailboxes instead of the Web, and I still used plain DOS without Windows 3.x or 95 even, I already listened to modules by different authors, including the "Members of Mayday" (Silicon Records), and one of their modules was a "HardCore VibeS (RmX)" by Spike.
I noticed that it sounds differently, depending on the player used. The sounds I liked were those produced by an older version of the Cubic player (up to legacy version 2.0α) and by MOD4WIN, playing the module with fast repetitive Jungle break beats. Other players instead (like all more or less modern players today: ModPlug, foobar2000, Winamp, Sonique, VLC, XMPlay, even PPPlay which was presented here a while ago) played and still play this song with boring occasional single percussion hits.
Using the (Open)ModPlug Tracker, I discovered that the patterns in this song contain a lot of Oxy "Set sample offset" effects, but mostly without playing a new note (see attached screenshot crop).
So I read the documentations about the S3M format I could find. In the documentation provided with ScreamTracker 3.21, no exception was mentioned for applying an effect to a continuing note. Other media Wikis were even briefer. The OpenMPT manual instead mentions a remark:
Now, which behaviour is correct?
a) "Millions of flies can't be wrong", and even the final ScreamTracker 3.21 (in DosBox) behaves this way
b) but the author will have had intentions, or he could have omitted these effects
Maybe an early ScreamTracker 3.0 beta behaved differently? ... The truth may be somewhere in between.
The other question is how to "fix" this module to make it sound like it may have been intended to sound, in my humble opinion.
A long, long time ago ... when there were landline mailboxes instead of the Web, and I still used plain DOS without Windows 3.x or 95 even, I already listened to modules by different authors, including the "Members of Mayday" (Silicon Records), and one of their modules was a "HardCore VibeS (RmX)" by Spike.
I noticed that it sounds differently, depending on the player used. The sounds I liked were those produced by an older version of the Cubic player (up to legacy version 2.0α) and by MOD4WIN, playing the module with fast repetitive Jungle break beats. Other players instead (like all more or less modern players today: ModPlug, foobar2000, Winamp, Sonique, VLC, XMPlay, even PPPlay which was presented here a while ago) played and still play this song with boring occasional single percussion hits.
Using the (Open)ModPlug Tracker, I discovered that the patterns in this song contain a lot of Oxy "Set sample offset" effects, but mostly without playing a new note (see attached screenshot crop).
So I read the documentations about the S3M format I could find. In the documentation provided with ScreamTracker 3.21, no exception was mentioned for applying an effect to a continuing note. Other media Wikis were even briefer. The OpenMPT manual instead mentions a remark:
Quote
This effect does not do anything if there is no note in the same pattern cell.
Now, which behaviour is correct?
a) "Millions of flies can't be wrong", and even the final ScreamTracker 3.21 (in DosBox) behaves this way
b) but the author will have had intentions, or he could have omitted these effects
Maybe an early ScreamTracker 3.0 beta behaved differently? ... The truth may be somewhere in between.
The other question is how to "fix" this module to make it sound like it may have been intended to sound, in my humble opinion.
