Load Protracker file in Blitz?

[Photon]

Originally Posted by Bren McGuire

Is there any free code out there to be able to load a protracker file in Blitz?
I'm not looking for player code necessarily, but something that can take a protracker file as input, load its samples in memory and access its sequence, but not necessarilty play it.
I guess as such it should not have any assembler in it to do this unless it is impossible to do without assembler.

I'm trying to make some analytics.

The whole point of high-level languages is to abstract you from the nitty gritty!

But what you're trying to do is nitty gritty.

Any language should support reading a stream of bytes from a file. This you can do, and then interpret it according the Protracker file format. Some MODs and MEDS might not follow it exactly, and you must account for this or throw an error.

[Bren McGuire]

I don't see any problem in trying to do "nitty gritty" with any language, it's not like this is a child's programming language.


I still haven't been able to do what I wanted to do, someone sent me a PM because they refuse to post here (!?) and the code they shared was unreadable to me. People seem to forget I said I am a newbie coder and I don't fully understand coding yet. You can't just send me a bunch of uncommented code with undecipherable variables. It all looks like taken out of the magic hat.

Originally Posted by Photon

The whole point of high-level languages is to abstract you from the nitty gritty!

But what you're trying to do is nitty gritty.

Any language should support reading a stream of bytes from a file. This you can do, and then interpret it according the Protracker file format. Some MODs and MEDS might not follow it exactly, and you must account for this or throw an error.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Bren McGuire

Would Bank allow me to do what I want?

Dude, from my experience so far with this, I'd say Bank is the only way you have to do whatever you want with the modfile. Save yourself a headache and skip the LoadModule function altogether.

[Photon]

Originally Posted by Bren McGuire

I don't see any problem in trying to do "nitty gritty" with any language, it's not like this is a child's programming language.

As I wrote it should support loading binary files...

Originally Posted by Bren McGuire

I still haven't been able to do what I wanted to do

... but it's also required that it does, to do what you want. Otherwise you simply can't.

Once you are able to read binary files, unless someone did the nitty gritty of interpreting the file you will have to do that nitty gritty. In whatever language you use, actually.

No language has a built-in function "LoadAndIndexSamplesFromProtrackerModule(filename)". Such a function would be too specialized.

In 2021, no language has a function "LoadXMLorJSONstandardfileAndIndexFormattedStuffInIt(filename)" either. Such a function would be too specialized.

I hope I've understood what you want and I hope you understand what I mean by this.

If you want the samples, several coders have written rippers. You could run that, get a bunch of files, and then index them.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Photon

I hope I've understood what you want and I hope you understand what I mean by this.

I don't think you have, this fella here was asking for help exactly on how to parse a MOD file with Blitz. There's no such thing, so he has to do his own, but he's just starting with coding, so cut him some slack.

Not everyone has to learn just doing tutorials or repeating code they see, personally, I like to learn with a very specific goal or project in mind. Results might take longer to come, but it feels a lot better than just doing random code that means nothing to me.

This guy here seems to me like he had a plan...

[Photon]

Maybe my clear explanation is intimidating?

Cutting some slack is also informing someone when something is hard to achieve, and suggesting an alternate solution.

Akira do you recommend Blitz Basic as the right tool to use to write a sample ripper?

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Photon

Akira do you recommend Blitz Basic as the right tool to use to write a sample ripper?

Why not?

I already have my own Protracker module parser built in blitz based on a lot of the topics discussed in this thread. Saving the samples would be trivial. If you mean a sample ripper as in "poke in memory and find samples", I have not tried that, but again, I don't see why not. But that's not what this dude wanted to do.

Again experimentation and learning should be encouraged, not discouraged in any way.

[Photon]

I've expressed myself clearly. I've asked but not yet received answer if Blitz Basic parses files well. If it doesn't, why use the wrong tool?

And you've done something like it but won't share this trivial sample saving? I don't get that.