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Saxonia Issue 01 Part 013
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.
