Amiga.org
The "Not Quite Amiga but still computer related category" => Amiga Emulation => Topic started by: RedWarrior on October 05, 2005, 12:27:19 AM
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OMG! I haven't used the forums for so long- it took me about 5 minutes to find the freakin "NEW THREAD" button!
Ok- I've had a flash of inspiration- hopefully some of you can back me up with some implementation ideas.
Mod format. music files. we all know about em, and some of us even revive our old game tunes from time to time to get that little pang of joy from the Amiga golden days... The format seems all but dead- and now everything is mp3, ogg, mmf etc...
WHY on earth can't we have mod format support in Flash? (You know, macromedia- standard web animation etc) Imagine it- potentially you could have similar Amiga demo style coding- with animation events linked to certain sample triggers (a la bouncing copper-bars, and the headbanging Newtek lady in Rebels Megademo II) Surely this could spark a revival of REAL creative content delivery? I've suggested this before, to lukewarm response, but now with the proliferation of mobile devices- and the need to have tiny file sizes etc... why not MOD ringtones? MP3's are massive in comparison.
I know many mobile phones support Java... is there a Java mod player? I just loved those amiga demos & games etc with their ingenious implementation of music... certain sections can loop seamlessly until an event is triggered- then new music kicks in... all from the same mod file.
Many questions... massive potential. I'm just going to kick the boing ball out there and see if there's anyone left with a bit of imagination. Love to hear your thoughts.
;-)
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People are still making MDS dude.and they sound soooo much better......check out MODS from UP-ROUGH and their demos
Nevertheless.I agree with you.............I wa hoping the MP3 player (the e-VIC) from commodore would play SIDS and MODS.................just imagine that!!!
Mabe someone can make a plugin for the i-POD to play MODS and SIDS! woooHooo! you have no idea how I would love that.
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Hi,
The Sony Ericsson P800, P900 and P910 can play MODs and SIDs via freeware software - I have a few of each type on my phone. The writer of the software originally stated that SID/MOD ring tone support was on his "to do" list, but development appears to have stopped quite some time ago, unfortunately.
Some info on the software required is here: N-Player (http://www.my-symbian.info/uiq/applications/applications.php?faq=4&fldAuto=26)
- Ali
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The MOD format has seen better days, I'll agree with ya. But I don't think its as bad as you think. You ought to check out Nectarine Radio, I am sure you'll get your fix. And I assume there are other sites that someone can/will mention.
http://www.scenemusic.net/
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Appreciate the feedback. I have checked a few of the links- I'm loving that SonyEricsson software- shame he hasn't completed the ringtone side of things.... that would be mad!
I'm aware of a few scene pages & amiga music mod archives- but what I'm pushing for is getting MODs out of obscurity and into the mainstream. Macromedia Flash- HUGE potential, not supported (as far as I know)... and the mobile phone market.
Dreams are free...
:roll:
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@RedWarrior
Agree. Mods are great. Suggested it once to some guys who had a project archiving "traditional" music.
didn't want MP3s because they are big and you loose note information. I suggested MOD because then you can sample traditional instruments too.
I think they ended up going midi though.
But they shoulda gone MOD MOD MOD....
I think one problem is that there isn't an actual MOD standard. There are quite a few different formats, it's more sort of a family.
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*blushing*
.. spot / up rough --> www.uprough.net :)
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spotUP wrote:
*blushing*
.. spot / up rough --> www.uprough.net :)
SpotUP RuLeZ 4eVeR!!!! :-D
SpotUP rulez da muzak scene
with 4 channels mods
that are crisp and clean
His music never skips a beat
Download it now
Its really neat!
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SDL Mixer supports MODs of several formats: .MOD, .S3M, .XM, and .IT. I realize you have to have a relatively new tracker for the Amiga to generate some of these but they work well. Likewise sdlBasic has been ported to AOS 4 and MOS so it should be easy to make new demos and programs to use these formats. (And a converter exists to export them to C++ in order to compile them.)
I don't know if the ProTracker event triggering mechanism is supported by the MikMod player in SDL_Mixer or not.
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Ok, stupid question :(
I'm old 8 bit and Amiga classic user...and I've played plenty of mods, but could someone please explain how mods actually work and why they are so great? I confess I'm ignorant of the difference between a mod and midi file.
I do remember at some point creating mods and writing a simple game make a call to a prepackaged mod (I think) which would cause the music to step through with each interrupt cycle... my memory is hazy so that may not be correct.
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@vic20owner
MIDI files are essentially a steams of event data. An event can be many things, but typically "note on", "note off", "program change", "controller change", type messages that instruct a MIDI compatible synth how to play a given bit of music. A midi file typically contains music that plays on up to 16 channels (as per the midi standard), but many notes can simultaneously play on each channel (depending on the limit of the midi hardware playing it).
Generally, MODs are similar in that they contain note on/off and other sequence messages that control the mod player. Unlike (most) midi files, however, they also contain sound samples that the sequence information actually plays. MOD files can have many channels (classic amiga mods have 4, corresponding to the inbuilt sound channels), but unlike MIDI, each channel can typically play only one note at once. However, since that note might be a sample of a chord, a drumloop or other complex sound, this is not particulalry limiting as it sounds.
There are a plethora of MOD formats that originated from different packages but they all have the above basic characteristics in common.
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I'm aware of a few scene pages & amiga music mod archives- but what I'm pushing for is getting MODs out of obscurity and into the mainstream. Macromedia Flash- HUGE potential, not supported (as far as I know)... and the mobile phone market.
Thing is... (I am assuming that you are counting in .xm aswell, when talking about mods, by the way... since I can't find any reason whatsoever not go for the better alternative).
...anyways, thing is, and not so many people seem to think about this; (I guess one can look upon this as some kind of metaphor in relation to the .mod discussion) I have been playing around with Deluxe Paint and Brilliance so much during the years. Then suddenly came the big isometric web graphics boom. And then came the oh my god so many tutorials for Photoshop and Paintshop Pro and so on... on how to "EASILY" make isometric graphics.
Okay. Well. Back to Deluxe Paint and Brilliance. EVERYONE. Simply EVERYONE i know that ever have tried to do some isometric graphics for their webpages completely wet their paints when they saw me play around in the two mentioned programs for the AMiGA. When they saw how the programs handled brushes and how the brushes could be used in modes (math for brushes with textures or color for single coloured brushes and so on) and how one could use this together will the grid, or anything really, to quickly generate massive isometric environments they didn't believe their eyes.
No matter how possible it is to set up a grid in Photoshop, no matter how possible it is to draw with locked colours in Paintshop Pro. No matter how lalalalalaLALALALALALA there is still no program out there that can compete with doing the same thing in Deluxe Paint or Brilliance. It is SO much easier. Yes, there is some freeware Grapfx or what it is called for Windows, and yes it implements many of the function, but it ain't there yet, not fully.
So.
My point?
Well.
Why do people keep on using Photoshop or Paintshop Pro or any other IMAGE PROCESSING software to create isometric graphics for the web? Instead of using programs that are perfetcly suited for handling pixels?
Because they don't know better.
They certainly ain't up to emulating the AMiGA just to get Deluxe Paint or Brilliance running (Brilliance doesn't even seem to work in WinUAE by the way), and then convert the .iff images they have made into .png or .gif. It is just to much of a process.
But still.
I guess I just have to accept the very fact that the genre of graphic programs that DP and B were active in, is dead, and no matter how well suited it is for pixelating, it does not matter. The mass have made their choice. I guess I just have to keep them isometric web graphic makers wet their paints, for whatever reason there is, to keep myself from letting the thought go and believe that I was wrong.
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If a new MOD format is to be made, it has to support stuff that you'd expect for a realtime music platform, like plenty of mixing and realtime effects. Most soundcards can only do that stuff for MIDI, and doing everything in software makes for some pretty complex players that rival an entire audio mixer in a typical OS. It would be a pretty big project just to get the technology into place, like, trying to write a whole new MILES(tm) clone with a music format attached.
Then again, I'm an audiophile, and I hate the terrible quality of audio on modern PCs, so my standards and expectations are pretty high to begin with. Audio and color management, on all modern computer platforms, pretty much sucks in every department.
Why do people keep on using Photoshop or Paintshop Pro or any other IMAGE PROCESSING software to create isometric graphics for the web? Instead of using programs that are perfetcly suited for handling pixels?
Because they don't know better.
I have the same problem as I am a cartoonist. Photoshop is good for photos but it is a ROYAL pain for doing flat-colored images with hard edges. Even painter is a pain. That's why I like oekaki, though those Java applets are anything but powerful and stable.
Yeah, it's funny how the only way to do old-school stuff is still with old-school tools. :-)
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Mod format. music files. we all know about em, and some of us even revive our old game tunes from time to time to get that little pang of joy from the Amiga golden days... The format seems all but dead- and now everything is mp3, ogg, mmf etc...
MP3 is much more flexible than MOD. Think it this way: MP3 "supports" (plays) just not only MODs but SID/AHX/XM/whatever formats...
Edit: in fact when considering file size MOD is not the best option. Even a dummy song wastes few kilobytes for nothing when a simple SID tune could be few hundreds bytes and not bigger than 64kB. AHX is another small format, AHX tunes are never larger than 64kB excluding comments.
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But editin MP3 may be painful when compared to MOD ;) I would use Ogg Vorbis btw. Too bad not as many hw players support OGG Vorbis.
AHX is cool...reminds me of some work todo..
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We need to make a difference between modules and mod-files. MOD-files are nice for retro stuff, but for modern music, we need something nice, like XM or IT.
Problem is that there hasn't been any new, serious attempts for trackers during the last few years. FT2 and IT are both ages old, and though a nice try, ModPlug doesn't really make it all the way.
There are some nice new tracker projects on the way, though, and hopefully people will start using them.
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Sure, we need something not as limited as 4ch MODs.
Have you tried Skale Tracker?
There is also ProTracker 5 in development.
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Have any of you tried ReNoise, I use this on Mac OS X and it is the closest I have gotten to writing music in an octamed style, the software is great and maybe somebody could convert it to the amiga?
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I use UltraMp3 on my nokia n-gage, and it allow me to listen to .mod .s3m .xm etc... and of course mp3.
Works like a charm.
By the way it's a series60 program so any nokia smartphone with symbian 6.0 or up should work.
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@Harima_Kun
Med Soundstudio (http://medsoundstudio.com) version 2 is going to be coming out soon for PC and possibly Mac. That should be closer to Octamed style. BTW they're even working on an AmigaOS 4 version (with fewer features though).
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Well i still use octamedss albiet via an emulated amiga, although i use it solely to sequence MIDI data to control harware samplers and synths. I had a brief look at the PC version but it wasn't the same, surely there would be slight timing differences too.
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Problem is that there hasn't been any new, serious attempts for trackers during the last few years. FT2 and IT are both ages old, and though a nice try, ModPlug doesn't really make it all the way.
Uhm... you have obviously missed out on SkaleTracker.
http://www.skale.org/
However, it has been a while now since the last major update, albeit not ages (but it is rather regulary updated with bugfixes and such).