Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: James Russell Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.programming.sound Subject: MOD player Date: Sun, 31 Aug 1997 16:01:38 +1200 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 53 Message-ID: <3408ECA2.D5D11A95@ibm.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: slip202-135-86-122.ak.nz.ibm.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.01 [en] (Win95; I) X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Hi all, I've had my Yaroze for about 2 months and work has *just* started to quieten down enough for me to begin some actual programming :O) I thought a good starting project would be to write an Amiga MOD player (moving up to XM when I can find the file format), to help me learn about the sound capabilities. However, I'm having a few difficulties, mainly with the manuals (which, to be honest, look like they were written by the programmer, not a tech writer). 1) I'm totally confused by the VAB format. From what the manual tells me, a VAB contains the sound samples and up to 128 programs, each with up to 16 sound tone lists. So - What the heck is a program? And after someone comes up with the answer to that: What the heck is a tone? What's with these sound tone lists? How can we edit what programs/lists go into a VAB? I understand that for 1 sound sample you might want to have different ways of playing it back (with different ADSR settings and such). Is this what a program/tone is? It was sooo much easier (and less versatile) on the Amiga when you just said "Here's the sound, play it at this rate" and forgot about it. 2) I may be going down the same dead end as a couple of other people here - converting a MOD into a MIDI file format, then playing that. Although I don't know much about MIDI, I was under the assumption that it would be possible to map a track (from 0-15) to a sample. This was you'd have 16 MIDI tracks (1 for each sample in a 16 sample MOD) and all would be Kool & The Gang. But I can't find any documentation on how to do this. Also, how does MIDI integrate with the 24 voices on the SPU? Looks like the only way is to write a MOD player that's called on the Vertical Blank (Woohoo! Back to the roots!) and use SetUtKeyOn and SetUtKeyOff. But I don't want to try that until I find out whether the SEQ way is possible. Note to Developer support: The ability to create cool programs is directly proportional to the quality of the documentation available. As soon as I figure out what the hoodle hey is going on with sound, I'm gonna writes me sum *nice* *easy to understand* documentation that starts from first principles, explains the difference between MIDI and sampled sound (recall that some programmers have only ever used sampled sounds), and decently explains the functioning of the SPU. Then I'll make it available to all. TTFN J