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21

Help me find that... / Re: Videogame song remix?

« on: March 02, 2017, 13:43:13 »

In japan, there is this very popular Shoot Em Up series called touhou. It became somewhat popular here in the west, mainly because it became a meme. Many of the songs are EXTREMELY fast paced and daunting, and they are such a joy to listen to. The songs themselves are MIDIs, and since I know they are somewhat like MODs, and because they are so popular, I was wondering if anyone had made a rendition of one of them as a MOD. Thank you!

Artist Susumu Takajima (https://modarchive.org/member.php?88815) did some...not all of them are listed under his name because he submitted them without claiming them as his own work (I think). Here is what I think is a complete list, including the ones not under his name. (If I missed any someone correct me)

Blade of Banishment: https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=178531
A Red Ground Cherry Soul: https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=178805
Eternal Maiden Shrine: https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=178200
Shrine of the Wind: https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=178263
High Prayer Response: https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=178301
Magic Mirror: https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=178327

22

Mobile Phone Players / Re: DroidSound E on Pixel crashes

« on: December 20, 2016, 14:32:25 »

It would make more sense to report your problem here: https://github.com/droidmjt/Droidsound/issues

Yes, and it did. Thanks to good communication and debugging, the issue has been resolved and I am now using DroidSound E. Yay! 

23

Mobile Phone Players / DroidSound E on Pixel crashes

« on: December 18, 2016, 04:03:45 »

Hi, I recently got a Pixel phone and my favorite music player for Android stopped working. Basically whenever it tries to access the broader local filesystem it crashes; it can access the example mods fine, but if I try to mount my Download directory it crashes before the directory selector dialog appears.

I'm using Android 7.1 and I know that more recent versions of Android require apps to request permission to access the filesystem, not sure if that's the problem though.

The behavior is the same in the original DroidSound that's on the Play Store.

DSE is my favorite player. No other player for Android uses OpenMPT, treats folders like playlists, and supports Bluetooth so well. I'd really like to be able to use it.

24

Tracking / Re: Triangle waves

« on: December 05, 2016, 21:02:21 »

Actually it might be fun to hijack my own thread and make it also about examples of the tri wave being used on the NES (or commodore 64, or chiptune mods) nicely I'll go scour my music collection...

25

Tracking / Re: Triangle waves

« on: December 05, 2016, 20:47:04 »

I see your point...but as an instrument it was either on or off, which meant no volume envelopes could be programmed. But I suppose it was quite often used as a simple bass.

26

Tracking / Triangle waves

« on: December 05, 2016, 14:00:51 »

Lately I've been using triangle waves, and my thoughts are:

They have a nice timbre to them, but you have to be careful or something like a square wave at full blast in the same mix will bury it easily. Due to the fact that many sound chips featured tri waves with square and other oscillator choices that are louder than tri waves, tri waves aren't used to their full potential because of the hassle involved with volume levels.

Infamously, the NES/Famicom had tri waves available, but no volume setting. Thus they were underutilized on that system. On C64 its a challenge as well, but at least you can use an ADSR envelope for volume.

Now with modern trackers we can draw triangle waves and use them in more advanced ways, but the characteristics of the wave still require care in the the mix. If I have a triangle wave at v64, a square will drown it out unless its about 28 or under, but making it work can have interesting results.

Try a tri wave for a flute solo with quieter square waves providing a harmonic framework for the solo.

What do you think about triangle waves?

27

Help me find that... / Re: Song from this JonTron vid?

« on: October 21, 2016, 22:57:58 »

That's from Donkey Kong Country 2 originally. The track is called Jib Jig. Here's a Youtube link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unSBD_4mDT4

28

Tracking / Making a module sound better across different setups

« on: July 16, 2016, 15:28:18 »

Hi, when making modules I've noticed that some .ITs I make sound pretty consistent across different speaker setups, and that some of my modules sound absolutely horrid on some speaker setups, but pretty decent on others. It's jarring to get in a car to listen to the latest song you've made and discover it sounds really bad. Now of course some speaker setups are really bad in and of themselves, but some of the bad ones I've played them on still play other modules well. I was wondering, if anyone had some tips on how to make modules more "universal" or consistent across audio setups, so someone won't listen on one pair of speakers and say "This is really badly produced" when they could listen on another pair and would say "this sounds decent"?

29

Tracking / Re: We can't use compressors or limiters on modules, but...?

« on: March 17, 2016, 20:20:07 »

Do what a compressor does, the manual way: Adjust the global volume.
But first off, get your mix right. Give each instrument a good volume so that it sits nicely in a mix. Attenuate higher notes played by the same instrument, as they will come out louder just by nature. Yes, this may require that you manually enter volume commands next to half of your notes, but it's so worth it. Also play around with channel volume and instrument/sample volume to balance things.

After that, you can export your tune to a wave file (or simply into a sample slot in OpenMPT) to check where are the loud and the quiet parts. Decrease the global volume in the loud parts, and slowly fade it up and down when transitioning between parts of different volume.
You can see this technique being used e.g. here: http://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=177409

If you just want to limit your module to make it loud and sacrifice its natural dynamic range, there is no alternative to a compressor, but you shouldn't do that anyway (welcome to the loudness war). Manually adjusting the global volume is completely okay though.

Thank you for your detailed and helpful reply. I had never thought of exporting to wave just to find where to adjust the volume, instead of playing the song through and looking at the dB meters. I suppose then you could increase the overall global volume and adjust the volume of the individual notes down so it doesn't peak too high where necessary? Your approach to adjust the global volume down in the loud parts is interesting; it must require a subtle hand not to kill the fullness of the sound, hmm...

Good song by the way.

30

Tracking / We can't use compressors or limiters on modules, but...?

« on: March 17, 2016, 13:30:35 »

Sort of a weird question, but when I make a module I find that it's...quiet as a mouse. So, turn up the sample volume, you'd say, right? Well, no, because then there's parts of the song that peak too high and the peaks get cut off. So, use a limiter you'd say...well, yeah, but I don't want to use VST plugins

Anyone have any tricks they want to share to deal with this? Being able to use compression would be really nice, but nope...can't do that. I got a few songs that are pretty good I think but they're just too quiet. When they come on I have to turn the volume way up to get a decent thunk in my ears.