Re: [Arianne-general] Music in Arianne...

[shren <sh...@io...>]

On Wed, 24 Jul 2002, Peter Gantner wrote:

> Quoting shren from Jul 23
> 
> > On Tue, 23 Jul 2002 zz...@co... wrote:
> > 
> > > Um... how exactly is the music going to be looped?  Is the digital audio 
> > > going to be looped seamlessly?  I'm thinking of writing pieces, so do I
> > > need to put certain special technical considerations to mind?
> > 
> >   Any sound that can be stored in memory can loop - in DirectX,
> > at least, this is easy to set up, and the default behavior if
> > I recall correctly.  (Thats why short sounds sometimes skip if
> > your system is running slow - the system lag keeps the buffer
> > from being updated, so it plays the same buffer a couple times.)
> > Longer tracks that can't all be stored in contiguious memory
> > get stored by the system in virtual memory.  If you have a track
> > that you want to play whose size is a significant piece of your
> > computer's memory, you're probably going to have trouble, so
> > check the target system specs for the project, if there are
> > any.  I know of no 'size rule of thumb', but tracks bigger
> > than 10% of the system memory should probably raise a warning
> > flag in your head.  (I didn't work much with looping large
> > files, though, so take that with a big shaker of salt.)
> > 
> >   The big trick is to minimilize length without making the 
> > track sound repetitive - this is why  "atmospheric" tracks 
> > are common.
> > 
> >   This is all from my direct x programming experience, I'm not
> > a project developer.
> 
> well, 2dclient by now uses .it tracks. .it is for Impulse Tracker, an 
> offspring of .mod, a system for making music originally availabe 
> for Amiga systems (and an offspring of C64 .SID but I digress).
> Now the great thing about MODs is that they are small if compared to 
> wav/mp3/ogg files generated from them. 
> Any sound (instrument) played in the piece is stored only once in the 
> file and then repeated by the player as needed.
> You can think of them as MIDI files with a built-in soundfont.
> 
> So memory will not be _that much_ of a problem (again, compared to 
> using mp3/ogg like most games).
> IMO, MOD and its offspring are the smartest file-format for music 
> ever, and we should use it exclusively for Arianne music.
> 
> But the quality of the sound output depends _a lot_ on the player 
> used, and its ability to make loops and reverb (and .it-specific 
> effects) sound good.
> On UNIX, mikmod and libmikmod deliver good results AFAIK, I dont know 
> which DLLs on Windowses would do the trick.

  Ah.  Ignore everything I've said, then.  Using something MIDI
like (which I know nothing about) cuts memory usage down to
comparitavely nothing.  It probably does change the way you
have to make the music.

-- 
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