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Protracker / Re: How to pitch shift samples in Protracker?
« on: January 13, 2021, 11:47:13 »We are talking about a clone of a program that was released in 1990, based on a file format invented in 1987, at the very beginning of the history of sampled music on home computers. Back then none of this was "basic".
In addition, the MOD format was originally designed to be a file format that can be played on the Amiga home computer with very little CPU overhead, to be played as game background music. It had basically no ease-of-use features. Like most tools of the time, everything was designed to consume as little CPU time as possible to process and not to be easily usable by a human being.
Technically I don't see that transposing by half notes should be any more taxing on the CPU than fine tuning, both would simply imply an offset value on the playback frequency set per sample. For example, MED introduced per-instrument transpose in v3.00 released in 1991. Not sure why this never became a thing in Protracker.
As for fine-tune in MOD files, I don't believe any of the pre-Protracker programs (Soundtracker, Noisetracker etc) had this. It first became part of the MOD-format in Protracker, along with extended command sets and CIA/BPM timing.