Saxonia Issue 01 Part 013

eZine lover (@eZine)

Published in 

Saxonia

 · 22 Aug 2019

  

Trackermusic on pc 
By Rumrunner/VOID 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

One day, when I visited a friend, I brought some of my new modules 
for him to listen to. It all started out fine, but then, I heard 
something was wrong. This was not the way the modules sounded at 
home. The sound was unclear and messy. What was this? 
Well, it didn't take me long to find out what the problems were. 

You know that the Amiga plays two channels on the left and the other 
two on the right. Using stereo in some ways will then be wrong on the 
pc because those computers plays everything on both left and right and 
then utilizing panning to decide direction if wanted. And then, you 
have those new trackers which plays stereo samples on a single channel, 
and I guess that they won't make this any better either. 

The other problem was that the trackers we tried didn't set volume 
commands right. C20 became C40 for instance. So when I played the 
sample once more on another channel to get a more "full" sound, it 
played with max volume. No wonder it sounded bad. I first thought that 
the trackers had some other ways of counting the volume, so that C40 
was the same that C20 is on Amiga, but that was not how it sounded. 

So, from now on my modules will include the message "Play with Amiga 
playroutine" in the samplename-text. 

Notice that FastTracker, the ms-dos tracker program on pc had an option 
in the config, where you could select Amiga or some else frequency 
tables. This is gone in the (very bad in my opinion) windows tracker 
programs today. Maybe this is also a source of bad sound when playing 
Amiga modules? 

So, I think that musicians ought to think about this when releasing a 
module. It's worth mentioning what kind of playroutine should be used 
in order to avoid people thinking that you are a bad musician simply 
because their overprized gamebox plays the module wrong.