English Amiga Board - View Single Post - Songs that use early Soundtracker modulation commands

james666 · 08 April 2018, 14:32

Thanks for the replies. I'm a long time lurker here!

For most purposes the Protracker tremolo and vibrato commands (with preset waveforms) no doubt suffice and have the advantage that no channels are lost (channel that controls the hardware modulation is always silent). However, I'm sure some interesting effects could be achieved with arbitrary modulation waveforms and several modulating channels chained together, and would have better quality than could be practically be achieved in real time with software. (For example, the Protracker replay would typically only update the effect with a resolution of ~50Hz depending on the CIA speed setting.)

It does seems strange that someone went to the trouble of building these features into the early Soundtrackers but never created any songs that use them. There's a very interesting discussion of Soundtracker evolution here by a guy who has written a Tracker replay library in Javascript: http://weaselaudiolib.sourceforge.net/ He hasn't found any historical examples either.

Maybe I'll have a go myself! I might write my own replay utililty too because Soundtrackers II-VI are a real pain to use (break if run on anything other than kickstart 1.2 with cycle-exact A500 timing) and I don't think any other replayers exist that support the legacy commands.

08 April 2018, 14:32	#4
james666 Registered User Join Date: Apr 2018 Location: New York Posts: 2	Thanks for the replies. I'm a long time lurker here! For most purposes the Protracker tremolo and vibrato commands (with preset waveforms) no doubt suffice and have the advantage that no channels are lost (channel that controls the hardware modulation is always silent). However, I'm sure some interesting effects could be achieved with arbitrary modulation waveforms and several modulating channels chained together, and would have better quality than could be practically be achieved in real time with software. (For example, the Protracker replay would typically only update the effect with a resolution of ~50Hz depending on the CIA speed setting.) It does seems strange that someone went to the trouble of building these features into the early Soundtrackers but never created any songs that use them. There's a very interesting discussion of Soundtracker evolution here by a guy who has written a Tracker replay library in Javascript: http://weaselaudiolib.sourceforge.net/ He hasn't found any historical examples either. Maybe I'll have a go myself! I might write my own replay utililty too because Soundtrackers II-VI are a real pain to use (break if run on anything other than kickstart 1.2 with cycle-exact A500 timing) and I don't think any other replayers exist that support the legacy commands.