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Post by gredler on Dec 1, 2022 23:52:20 GMT
That's definitely the case sometimes... But sometimes not. Yes, I was clearly overgeneralizing. There are actual musicians who pick up instruments and start garage bands. But what I'm talking about the the accessibility of a tracker. A tracker is a tool usable by folks without having a lot of musical familiarity. A good tracker can provide a simple visual layout that matches up to the chip audio capabilities and lets people plot notes without having any knowledge of reading music or even playing an instrument, necessarily. A tracker can be a powerful tool usable by musicians to do cool stuff, too, but the simplicity of the starting interface (based on my limited interactions with older tracker software) is such that it's an approachable tool for non-musicians to dabble in music, in addition to all the other things trackers can do.
&& You could literally be fumbling around in any music related software, "until stuff sounds good". Trackers don't have some monopoly on this. My point is that trackers have an accessibility advantage over many other electronic/digital music tools in that they are more approachable by people without musical experience than traditional DAWs and MIDI setups. Trackers are often a gateway drug for non-musicians who are pulled in to music, especially by video game music. Trackers can be powerful tools for generating music, but they also have an accessible basic interface that can be easier for total noobs to get comfortable with.
I would argue that garage band and fruity loops is a great music making tool for someone who never touched music stuff before and are *very* accessible. I got an ipad a few years back and was like huh wow this thing has some basic music making tools built in out of the box, crazy. I had zero musical experience outside of fruity loops making terrible music in the late 90s until recently hopping into deflemask then furnace after fumbling through mml attempts, so I've played both sides of this arguement I would say hahaha I think this has gotten way off topic, but thanks for splitting this out into its own thread Is it wrong to say that trackers also export the cleanest data for implementing chiptunes on real hardware? What other music genration tools (daws?) can output data similarly? As far as I know daws always export high bitrate / pcm stuff not psg waves associated with hardware specifc capabilities, or am I missing something? I was always under the impression it is the accuracy of hardware emulation that attracted chiptune enthusiests try trackers instead of VSTs in daws, regardless of their prior knowledge of music.
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Post by DarkKobold on Dec 2, 2022 19:17:11 GMT
Can we cool the acrimony in here, please? Is there something in the water that whenever a discussion comes up people will decide randomly to be poor communicators and get pissed at each other? There's a lot of unwarranted comments from the peanut gallery. Comments that are dismissive and condescending from the outsiders are going to set people off who are actively participating in homebrew.
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Post by dshadoff on Dec 2, 2022 19:24:20 GMT
I don't know much about the tools to make music, but I suspect there may be a gap between what a tool allows you to do and what the target console's limitations are.
The original console is very limited on storage - so whatever way the music is stored on the console, it needs to be extremely compact. Also, one needs to live within the confines of the console's capabilities for producing sound, which need to be properly accommodated by the playback routines. And finally, those limitations (i.e. sounds which cannot be properly payed back) should be ideally made impossible by the composition tool, but at worst, flagged by the tool.
These concepts are where MML originated - the language was built up from the raw capabilities of the system, and produce a simple bytecode which is compact. But yeah, I can certainly see that some people would struggle with it.
On the other hand, modern tools would tend to allow (or even promote) the use of features which can't be replicated on the PC Engine... for example, a single sample could easily be larger than an entire PC Engine ROM.
I can certainly understand that one tool would be great for composition and listening to during the development of a tune, and then flip over and "re-write" for the target platform, because conversion is a non-trivial problem.
In a metaphorical comparison, the PC Engine simply can't support the running of, say, code developed in Python. Even though Python is considered easy to use and popular... it's far too sprawling and resource-intensive to run on 35-year-old hardware. I've explained this to many a programmer who wanted to target retrocomputers. But it is certainly possible to develop an algorithm by developing and testing it in Python on a PC, and then rewrite it in HuC or assembler to target PC Engine. You might still have performance issues, but the overall flow will be developed faster.
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Post by gredler on Dec 2, 2022 21:11:01 GMT
It makes me wonder why a tracker can't export mml?
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Post by elmer on Dec 3, 2022 19:07:19 GMT
The original console is very limited on storage - so whatever way the music is stored on the console, it needs to be extremely compact. These concepts are where MML originated - the language was built up from the raw capabilities of the system, and produce a simple bytecode which is compact. But yeah, I can certainly see that some people would struggle with it. IIRC, MML was originally created so that you could encode music in a simple text-string in BASIC. There's nothing magical about it, nor does that origin itself make it either "good" or "bad". It's just a stream of notes and pauses, separated by the channel that the stream plays back on. Data from a Tracker can be just as compact as MML, or MIDI ... at the end-of-the-day, it's still just a stream of notes and effects with timing information. Both turboxray and I convert Deflemask files into something that looks a lot like a binary-encoded form of the text strings that the original MML music text-strings looked like ... which is much closer to the binary-encoded music data that the System Card's player processes. It makes me wonder why a tracker can't export mml? Because there is no "standard" form of MML that supports the FX-processing effects which are what makes good tracker tunes sound interesting and not just a sequence of static notes. Heck, AFAIK there is no "standard" Tracker language for encoding and processing of those FX either. Old ST and Amiga trackers used very simple and fast tricks for their effects, but since Deflemask was closed-source and undocmented, I had to implement its effects with fairly slow code for my player, and I expect that turboxray may have done the same. Perhaps Furnace offers more well-defined and faster-to-process FX algorithms ... I don't know. There's no magic-bullet for creating "chiptune" music, and I really wish folks would stop looking for one. The real "magic bullet" that the PCE offers is CD-AUDIO ... nice and easy to compose for today, and *far* better sounding (from a purely-technical standpoint) than *any* chiptune.
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Post by spenoza on Dec 3, 2022 21:19:18 GMT
There's no magic-bullet for creating "chiptune" music, and I really wish folks would stop looking for one. The real "magic bullet" that the PCE offers is CD-AUDIO ... nice and easy to compose for today, and *far* better sounding (from a purely-technical standpoint) than *any* chiptune. There is a real challenge facing home brew in this community, and that challenge stems from there being fewer people to program and develop music and art assets than in other home brew scenes. In a lot of ways the scene has done well comparatively despite this, but it does mean people have to do more with less. That said, I think there’s nothing wrong or misplaced in hoping for a tracker with export to a compatible sound engine. That’s not a magic bullet. This capability already exists in other retro home brew scenes. There’s no reason to think it can’t happen someday for the PCE dev scene. I don’t think people should sit around waiting for someone else to do it, but if doesn’t preclude us discussing what we want in the way of tools. I think seeing CD audio as a reason not to bother is also misplaced. There are more cart-capable units than CD-capable units in the hands of retro enthusiasts. And there’s also a love of chip tunes. Sticking to what can fit on an 8 meg cart played by a basic PCE hypothetically expands the audience for home brew works (including the Analog Pocket). It’s also still something of a new frontier for devs. The scene’s been putting out CD games for years. This is a new challenge with different rules and constraints. We do need to remember, however, that nobody owes anybody else dev tools. Someone talking about a cool thing they’re working on doesn’t obligate them to finish it and release it if they’re not ready yet or even no longer interested. It can be frustrating to feel like someone is dangling something in front of you, but they really aren’t. They want people to be excited about the cool thing they are making, but sometimes time and motivation are limited commodities. I know this is very generalization and platitude heavy. I’m very interested in people being patient with the situations and people they can’t change.
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lunoka
Gun-headed
Diving into retrodev
Posts: 55
Homebrew skills: art, music
Fave PCE Shooter: Burning angels
Fave PCE Platformer: Ninja Spirit
Fave PCE Game Overall: Valis 3
Fave PCE RPG: Neutopia
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Post by lunoka on Dec 3, 2022 21:56:31 GMT
May I add that the Dekadence team, apparently known on the Amiga scene, has released a pc engine demo this year, the sound engine is based on a mod player. The dev is willing to release this player later this year or next. Actually it's a 4 chan player but he will add the 2 extra chans for the release. touko has said it wouldn't be a problem to manage 1 or 2 chans to implement sfx playback for a real game solution. I assume it's developped in asm though so some integration work is probably needed to nest it into HuC. And Mooz is also still working on his vgm player, with a new version based on Furnace vgm export since this custom one may lead to some size reduction through factorization ( same feature than mod stuff ).
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