SonicArranger

[Pyrdacor]

@alex: After some more research I will emulate Paula as you suggested. It makes the implementation much easier and I can just use the reverse engineered code parts.

But I will allow higher sample rates.

[Pyrdacor]

Songs now sound quiet good but a bunch of effects are still not implemented.

In the data each voice can have a "note transpose" and "sound transpose". Anyone knows how this is used and what the difference is? I guess it's just a pitch shift. But by how much? x notes? x octaves?

Maybe "note transpose" is by x notes and "sound transpose" by x hertz?

I don't quiet understand why I would need transpose in a tracker as I could just use the other note instead. Anyone can explain?

Thanks

[alexh]

In music, transposition is stored as the key once per bar, rather than once per note, effectively allowing you to reuse the same pattern of notes to produce a different sound.

Could this be the same in the SA?

If it is stored once per note then it doesn’t make sense. If it is stored once over “n” notes it makes sense. A form of pattern compression?

[Pyrdacor]

Thanks Alex. I found it via reverse engineering. The transpose values are stored per voice where voice is a single division in a pattern.

The note transpose is just added to the note index. So you can just change the note. I think the reason is because voices can reuse notes and maybe can save some bytes this way.

The sound transpose is just added to the note's instrument index. So you can also change the instrument by reusing a note as well.

Moreover each note has some flags which control if they are transposable. One bit for note transpose and one for sound transpose. By default a note is transposable in both ways.

[Pyrdacor]

You can now download the first prototype of the converter here: https://github.com/Pyrdacor/SonicArranger

It's an open source project. The converter is a command line tool which should run on Windows and Linux. It can convert SA files to WAV files. Still WIP. The Ambermoon songs sound good (not checked all).

[alexh]

Amberstar had a hidden Jukebox built into the game to play the various music tracks. I don't think it was in Ambermoon but I think some gfx might exist. Maybe a feature for the remake?

There was also a nice demo by PHF for Atari ST for the Atari versions converted by Big Alec but never

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[meynaf]

Originally Posted by alexh

Amberstar had a hidden Jukebox built into the game to play the various music tracks. I don't think it was in Ambermoon but I think some gfx might exist. Maybe a feature for the remake?

Ambermoon can also give access to all musics but not right from the start. You can do it by using elf-harp.

[Pyrdacor]

Yeah I will implement the elf-harp along with the music to test it easier.

[Pyrdacor]

The SonicArranger lib and the tool to convert SA to WAV (SonicConvert) got an update to 1.7. They now can nicely load/convert all Ambermoon tracks and maybe every track there is.