How to export a song with samples as instruments?

[defdanny]

Hi Arkos,
first of all: thank you for this fantastic tracker!
I use it to create music and soundFX for a MSX1 game project (some preview clips can be seen on YouTube here

For some of the BGM I want to use short sampled instruments. For example the first track in the above linked video, a port of the Amiga Hybris in-game music, where I used short looped samples for the pulse bass and the pulse lead. These Amiga-typic sounds cannot be generated with the AY-3-8910.

But I did not manage to export these sample instruments to AKG format!?
Here are the options I use in AT2 in the export options:
– Export used samples (checked)
– Amplitude (8 bits) = 16 (4 bits selected)
– Offset (8 bits) = 0 (Unsigned)
– Padding length = 0
– Fade out length = 0
– Exp. only used length (checked)

The exported song plays only silence when it should play these instruments. What do I miss? How should I configure the export options or AKG player?

Thanks a lot!
Def Danny

[defdanny]

Oh man, I wanted to say “Hi Targhan”! 🙂

[Targhan]

Hi!

It is very important to understand that, for now, the AKG player does NOT play samples. Sorry for the disappointment. The reason is because samples are tricky to do on 8-bits, and each platform will need a specific player. The AKG is probably too slow to play samples anyway, so AKY is better suited (but then you’d have to detect WHEN to play the samples, this information is lost in the AKY which is basically streams of registers).

There is no out-of-the-box solution for that right now, you will have to manage them by yourself.

The AKG format exported the samples, so you should be able to play the samples in your own side-player, but as I said, it would be better to export the song as AKY, and export the samples using the Sample export option. As to know WHEN to play your samples, one solution could be to replace your samples by fake PSG instrument, play the AKG song and build some kind of sample-list indicating a timestamp and note and sample number, which could then be used by your sample player.

So this is no trivial work! Maybe I’ll do something about that later, but this is not top-priority…

[defdanny]

Hi Targhan,
thank you very much for your quick response.
This clarification helps a lot, I was wondering if I missed something in the AKG documentation. It’s okay if I know that there is no easy out-of-the-box way to do it.

Well, I am more the “artistic guy”, and do not understand much of Z80 Assembler…but I can imagine that samples in general are a memory-and CPU-consuming thing on 8-bit platforms like MSX or the Speccy. The fact that the AK2 can handle samples led me to the hope, that I can use them as alternate instruments, to create special waveforms that the AY could not generate by itself…. well, I will stick with the PSG instruments, thats fine.

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