I'm looking for a music composer to botch some stuff together for the heck of it, so I figured I'd ask here. Dunno why, as this is a programming forum...

Anyhow, does anyone know of a free MIDI composificationising program, preferably using a fairly logical interface (staves, tracker...)?

Activates n00b mode
PS: Does the MOD format work like MIDI (stores notes), or like WAV (stores long, wiggly line )? If it's like MIDI, then that'd be fine too.

MOD files store notes and samples (WAV's)..

So, it stores the notes kinda like this (or not (ie á la MIDI)):

Beat:  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

s                     
a 1                 
m 2             
p 3              
l 4             
e

& the samples (1 - 4 (in this case)) are stored in wav format.

My understandink, is she beink correct?

No.. The Mod format originated on the Amiga, so it's in more of a programers format.

Have a look at this for some info:

[url http://www.wotsit.org/search.asp?page=2&s=mod]

But it stores a bunch of short sounds and how to put them together, right? That was the real question.

Anyway, note (from my prev post):

That means I'm not quite sure.

PS: Actually, the real question was "Where can I get a free MIDI (or related) composificationising app?"

Yeah, kind of

Good trackers:

Fasttracker 2 (good format (.xm) easiest to use)
Impulse Tracker (slightly more powerful format (.it) than FT2, but harder to use)
MadTracker (Win32 tracker)

(note: the original .mod format is outdated and is basically only used today for 4-channel compos and nostalgia)

Does Fast have a website? & is it free? I seem to remember it not being.

if you really want midi, there is jazz++ for win wich is under GPL.
JAZZ++ main page
But midi song sounds different on different computer whereas those mod format sound the same on all computer (am I clear...i'm not sure;))

I'm not that fond of midi (knew about the variation), it's just it creates tiny files compared to most wave formats, & are a hell of a lot easier to edit once they have been ‘compiled’, as it were.

If there was a file type that eliminates the variation problem while still using a similar format, I'd use that. And, IIUC, MOD does.

Don't forget about Modplug tracker: www.modplug.com

MOD/S3M/XM/IT do indeed store a list of short samples, plus 'pattern data' indicating when to play which samples. I highly recommend these formats for games. Yes, they're usually larger than MIDI - but they're also usually smaller than OGG. (MP3 doesn't count because it's patented ) If you're worried about file size, go for IT - it has sample compression, which the others don't have.

DUMB's docs contain information for getting started tracking, and as a bonus you can use DUMB to play the songs back Click here and scroll down to the section entitled "Downloading music or writing your own", about 3/4 of the way down.

Thanks all.
I'll look in to tohes links now, & that DUMB tute.

PS: ‘DUMB’ is nearly as good for punning as ‘Irrelevant’. (eg: A:"What is your name?" / B:"My name is Irrelevant." / A:"What is your software?" / B:"My software is DUMB." / A:"What is your favourite color?" B:"Yellow. No, blue! AAAAaaagh!" )

Look at MAZ sounds. It hosts tons of trackers, players, etc. There's also some MIDI stuff. If you want to get serious with tracking, checkout Renoise.

Bruce, I have to ask: what's wrong with WinAMP's mod-playing support? It always seems to work fine for my mods.

The mod plugin that comes with WinAmp (there are others of course, and better ones) does reasonably well with most mods but totally fails if the song uses some "advanced" features of the tracker it was composed with. If you want proof you can download and listen to <a href="htt://www.geocities.com/miran014/music/oxy4_chp2.zip"">this (7k)</a> first in WinAmp and then in Impulse Tracker (it was composed in IT with a little help from MPTracker). If you can't hear the difference, you're deaf...

EDIT:
...or download and listen to this (1.1MB).

ouch.. not that the fmod player faired much better.... really really bad... bad... bad... OMG it was so bad.

DUMB also fails miserably on that one. However! I am working on it right now Filters will be the hard part, but I think I can do it.

I think you'll find Winamp is worse than DUMB - the plug-in that comes with Winamp can't do plain old arpeggios correctly (at least not last time I tried). I can't vouch for fmod - it's completely silent with this file on Linux

** NOTICE ** NOTICE ** NOTICE **
If you are using windows, forget all about those other programs mentioned

www.renoise.com

This prog kicks the ***es of all other trackers and is free
The first one worthy of being a follow up to fasttracker II !!

GET IT NOW, I seriously recommend that prog above all other progs for tracking midi/mod/xm or anything else.

I just read this

and I must say I disagree. FT2 is NOT easiest to use. The one bad side of the 0ldSk00l Amiga trackers was their interface and FT2 followed the tradition. Scream Tracker (from Future Crew) however broke this tradition with a new intuitive and easy to use interface and IT is the successor of Scream. So Impulse Tracker is far more suitable for people starting with trackers than FT2. The only reason IT was never as popular as FT2 is because most newbies decide to start their tracking experience with IT, make shitty music and polute the internet with it while on the other hand only the seasoned veterans who know how to use the ugly traditional tracker interface keep on using FT2 (and the lookalikes) and make kewl music with it. And there's another good thing about IT: the documentation. AFAIK Impulse Trackers manual is the best piece of documentation a newbie or an experienced musician could want.

So to sum it up, comparing IT and FT2 is a lot like comparing Allegro with SDL. IT is more powerfull, easier to use and has great documentation, while FT2 on the other side is used to produce more professional music.

PS: FT2 and IT are now very antiquated programs written for DOS but are still quite commonly used as they have no proper Windows replacements. Some trackers however come close, namely there was Buzz which was later replaced by Psycle, then there was NoiseTrekker and its successor Renoise. MadTracker and especially ModPlug Tracker don't even come close to being good programs.

EDIT:
@Funklord: does noone read the thread before posting anymore? I just recommended Renoise a few posts ago... Oh and even if I think the traditional tracker interface sucks, I still think Renoise IS kewl.

Miran: Sorry, but I just had to make it crystal clear!! =P

you realise that at least 80% of the worlds tracker population would agree that fasttracker was the easiest to use module editor, there is no question about this,
IT is a very difficult unintuitive program to use (USING TEXT MODE!!), and the small additions made by the .it file format can be lived without, especially as many of the features are anything but standard.

Screamtracker (.s3m) was made before FT2.
FT2 was an update in almost every aspect of a tracker experience.

IT followed the screamtracker path of just adding features (multiplying channels/instruments), but still not providing a useful interface to control them, thus, simply cannot compete in a UI comparison
Nor did the file format ever offer any WOW features above the much more standard xm format.

Oh great! I can use 64 channels instead of 32 now.. or slightly more variable panning ...what a boost!

Most users who tried IT made 1-3 tunes, bragged about how they could use 64 channels. When noone cared they quickly got fed up and started using ft2 again.

funklord, its already been mentioned, but anyway. its more 'shareware' then free because several features (they are not vital, but nice) however these features cost 45$usd..

it still rocks.

I guess everybody is entitled to their own opinion but I still think IT has a better interface than FT2. Actually the first tracker that I ever saw was FT2. I threw it away after 15 minutes because I couldn't figure out how to load a song. And 10 of those 15 minutes I was trying to fiqure out how to close the program. With IT however it was love at first sight. I later tried on several separate occasions to track a tune with FT2 but never got past loading 2 samples! It's a similar story with Renoise although I have managed to load some more samples and I even wrote an entire pattern...

BTW, Impulse Tracker's format is far more superior to xm than you think. Not only it can do more channels, it also has NNAs and builtin filters (I know, with Renoise around this all sounds ridiculous).

From what I can tell, Renoise is good if you plan to export your music to WAV or OGG. However, its file format is closed; don't expect to find a library anytime soon that can play its files. I don't think it'll even be possible to write a player for Linux, without doing some evil trickery to make VST work. (I could be wrong here - I know very little about VST - I just have this feeling that it's unportable.) I don't think Renoise can save XM files, and it doesn't import all XM files properly; I have one that sounds completely wrong.

Funklord: try to be just a TINY bit objective

IT's main advantages over FT2, imho, are:

• Two instruments can share a sample

• Sample compression

The first two are good for amateur games, of course; many people still only have 56k connections. The last-mentioned is very useful for making tunes sound less robotic, and you don't have to sacrifice several channels and spend time distributing the notes between them in order to make it work.</li>

I'd add filters to the list if they were supported better outside IT. Filters may have compatibility problems, but I believe everything else in IT is pretty standard now.

And winamps 3's mod player has managed to crash my computer on one mod(and i cant load it up or it will crash my computer), and totally refuse to play another.

winamp has always been a crappy mod player. The best player for any format, is the program that created it. (usually)

As far as which tracker has the better interface, I don't see the point of the argument. They are all equally bad.

I played music for 6 years of my life. In that time, never once did I see printed on a staff, "F5 0x15". I saw a quarter note on the top line (?) of the treble clef with a symbol next to/on top of it. This is how I, and most people who actually play instruments, think of music. To edit it in a form that is little better than a hex editor is rediculous.

In this day and age, there is no reason for me to memorize effects codes. I shouldn't have to look up in some table the code to a glisando or various other effects. I shouldn't have to look at music in text form. Composers don't compose music by writing out "F5 G5 C5". They compose with a staff, notes, and appropriate music notation. You can't even make chords in trackers; that's a rediculous limitation.

The only reason that modern trackers (MT2, for example) use these antiquated interfaces is because tracker users are used to them. The only reason that some prefer FT2 over IT is that FT2 came first and that's what they're used to using.

BTW, what's an NNA?

I am in no way an expert when it comes to tracking,
but I'll add my limited experiences to this thread
anyway.

When, after looking around the net, I chose ModPlug
one big reason was that it could import MIDI files.
I already had much music made for my game when I
decided to switch from MIDI to some tracker format.
I have also used it a lot like a MID2IT converter,
allowing me to compose in the more friendly
environments of Cubase and Finale and do the final
cleaning up in ModPlug. This is a system that works
for me, and most of my music has originally been
MIDI.

NNA stands for new note actions. In all trackers before IT NNA was "cut". That means that if a note was playing on say channel 7 and then another one came in the same channel the first one would be stopped. IT has the ability to continiue playing previous notes when a new note comes in.

Of course you can. You just made one (that F5 G5 C5 is a chord).

Trumgottist: in my experience, ModPlug Tracker messes up the MIDI timing when you import; the MIDI file has to be going at a specific tempo for ModPlug to do a passable job importing it. Isn't that a problem for you?

When talking about statistics and experiences, it's hard to be objective, I'm just stating mine, and noting that I am probably speaking for a majority.
(most tracker peeps do not code)

The point of tracking, is to create a file for which there is an easy way to edit, and is a computer friendly format.
Samples / volume columns / effect columns in low resolution, make these things easy, but adding functions such as filters and synths immediately makes it into more of a production tool, where the sound will probably never be the same in 2 different programs, that is why it becomes a better idea to record the sound first in those cases.

If you want game compatible music, use only samples, or if you really need fx, add an extra FX with a fast & dirty algorithm.
I can't imagine you'd want to use the same kind of cpu killing algorithms found in trackers like renoise and some .it editors.

anyone who's been in the tracker business for awhile and moved over to professional music composition software, will know that this is usually a not so wanted feature, since mostly you want to have full control over which notes are cut and when.
If sounds are not cut when playing a second note, the overview of the song is spoiled, since it will be using more channels than you actually see.
When going over to midi, this problem immediately becomes apparent since adding new sounds immediately starts polluting the audio which makes you have to re-arrange your tune and make mixing levels correct again.
It is very difficult to cut notes in midi, since you'd have to do it manually for most progs, but in trackers it is a lovely feature to specifically not have NNA.

There are very little limitations with module files, since their orientation is to allow a user to specify exactly how a sound is played.
When channels start popping up automatically and (non-open) FFT effects are added, it spoils the idea of easily editable standardised computer generated music.

Yes, it requires some tedious post-import editing
when it comes to the timing, but I generally still
find the process more comfortable than composing
directly withing MP (or, I imagine, other trackers).

If I write something in a classical style, I use
Finale so that I can see the music and get a good
overview visually. If I do something more
improvised, I use Cubase and record the music as I
play it. (As an example, when I made the "Islands"
music for Rocket Duel, I started with the background:
base, guitar and drums. Then I played that over
and over again, improvising a melody on top of it
and recording when I felt ready. That's AFAIK not
something you can do with a tracker.)

Korval: that's one of the advantages of tracking - you don't need any formal music education to begin tracking as opposed to regular music (but unfortunately, there's no law against releasing the first really crappy mod's you make on the unsuspecting 'net ). IMHO, reading notes from a mod is easier than trying to read regular sheet music: I see G-5 in a tracker and think "ah, that's a G" instead of seeing a note and thinking "ok, that line down there I know is a D, how far up is this one: 1,2,3,4,darn, lost count..."...

Um, isn't that what Renoise does? So yes, I agree that Renoise is good if you plan to prerecord your music (I already said that). However, your claim that we can "forget all about those other programs mentioned" isn't exactly objective

Also, as I implied earlier, NNAs are pretty standard with IT now. Most module players handle them correctly (I'd be hard pressed to think of one that doesn't).

Trumgottist: I'm impressed if you can import a MIDI file into ModPlug Tracker and then fix the timing I've always found I had to set the tempo just right using the prog that generates the MIDI and then import the tweaked MIDI file, after which triplets still need tweaking with SDx effects.

midi timing is much higher resolution than mod files,
mods save space & processing by allowing the user to choose the resolution needed themselves, of course there comes the occasional odd note that needs to be out of time, but those can be made so with the trig command, or by editing the sample data.
obviously a mod will never get a "Live" feel unless the artist goes through loads of tedious trouble in making it.
But is that always what you want?
My ears like perfectly synchronized music better, I am not looking for those tiny errors a drummer makes while playing the drums etc.
There used to be a time when quantize functionality in midi sequencers was a hot thing, now it is frowned upon because it makes music "too perfected"
mods are very tedious to make imperfect unless they develop some new "humanize" fx or feature

Anyways, trackers, sequencers and Audio suites are all aimed at totally different types of music composers.

Tracker people create their own little samples and make the music using one small PC
the end result is a portable playable file
The reason for this is obvious, smaller files, less equipment needed, and possibility to put the music in a program.

Sequencer people don't create instruments, instead they normally use ready made ones from synths etc.
Releasing a midi file will not benefit others very much since it might probably sound a bit cheesy on their side.
So a downmix of the material is required as wave.
These people create orchestral symphonies or other live material, and are not very concerned about the downmixed result, instead the notated work might be the more important product.

Audio suite people try to combine all musical capabilities into their programs, mixing midi instruments, software instruments, recorded audio tracks etc.
If you ever need to punch in recordings, or use samples longer than 20 seconds, you probably belong to this group.
Everything will need to be leveled, filtered, mastered and then downmixed.
The end result is of course a wave file.

Although this type of musicianship is very common, it is also the most expensive, with an average studio price of maybe $10k

Which leaves "tracking" a great option for hobbyists, and people who don't like the thought of dedicating 2 rooms to audio equipment, or if you wanna use your laptop to make music on the move???

as a sidenote, I too find the
12 E-6
13 G-5
mod way of displaying musical data much easier to read than a real score.
The notation format we still use is old and deprecated, and only benefits string instruments in its design.
(otherwise why would all audio packages change the format?)
xx-------
---xxx-
-xx----
the above typical sequencer format is nice too, but in a different way, for different purposes.

This seems to be one of those topics everyone has an opinion in. I seem to be worryingly good at kicking off threads about those.

I got ModPlug yesterday, & spent the last... ages looking for samples / instruments. Any good sites? (Preferrably with a .zip of common sounds (piano, grand piano, electric piano, violin, harpsicord, trumpet, flute, etc).)

MAZ sounds

Doesn't actually hold any songs or samples but there's a huge number of links and you can order sample CDs and things...

EDIT:
Hammersound

Holds tons of soundfonts, both single instruments and complete GM collections. You can use those as a replacement for the default SBLive sound font or you can rip individual instruments and/or samples with a program like Awave studio or something and use them for your tracking needs...

A chord would be several notes played simultaneously. And I have yet to see a .mod format that allows one to specify more than one note per track.

What does it matter if the file uses more channels than it says? What does it matter that music is divided into channels at all? This are all implementation details that should never make themselves known to the user.

There is something to be said for actually knowing something about music and music theory before actually trying to make music. A lot of musical notation (key signatures and so forth) is rooted in music theory, thus making it somewhat difficult to make theoretical mistakes.

That's nothing. Try reading music at 120 beats per minute where, not only do you have to parse the music into notes, you then have to convert these notes into finger positions in real time. This is the skill that is required for playing an instrument.

For someone who is familiar with playing instruments and reading music, mod-view is a very distracting and imprecise way of looking at music. A staff view can pack so much more information than a mod view ever could. After all, most mod views only show approximately one measure at a time. It's hard to compose when you're only looking at music one measure at a time.

Old, yes. Depricated? Hardly. Depricated by what? Do you have a more precise, informative, and compact representation of music? Your standard tracker view certainly doesn't provide this. As I said, a standard tracker view can only show about a measure's worth of music at a time, while the typical staff view can show an entire melodic phrase (4-8 measures). It's much easier to see the relationships between notes in various sections of the phrase.

Because efficient data storage is different from the view of that data? The view of data is solely for the benifit of the user; otherwise, why not just use a hex editor? The basic tracker interface is not too much more than a glorified hex editor anyway.

Renoise does that!

Hey, I compose all my music with a hex editor!

Seriously though, I have to agree with Korval here. I've written a lot of good music in notation form - and I mean good. (I don't mean to brag though ) I've yet to write anything anywhere near as good using a tracker.

Now if only NoteWorthy Composer worked with Wine...

hehe, ben, You should take that one allegro example, the one with the keys and modify it to actually record and playback the notes

That's a common feature of all kinds of music editors (trackers, sequencers, etc.)

eh. its midi though

I don't know about sequencers but most trackers have the functionality to record whatever you play with your computer keyboard (no MIDI). Or do you think you should be able to record music by clicking an onscreen keyboard with the mouse? That would be cool. Useless but cool...

Yup. Very useless. But a fun hack for someone who knows what they are doing

You are only saying this because you are trained and used to seeing musical scores in the old traditional way, as you yourself described being able to read it in 120 bpm with no trouble.
This requires a lot of practice, and my opinion is that a printed out A4 sheet of tracked music will certainly contain much more information in a smaller amount of space, and it has a compact way of reaching more than 8 octaves, can you say the same for the usual notated music?
You can jot down chords yes, but I also said that this form of notation is living an afterlife of the previously more common string instruments...
A keyboardist does not need to care about chords unless they are composing music, otherwise the keyboard is mapped out in a very orderly fashion for not having to concentrate on such builds for tonal structure.

Ok, obviously a guitarist will always prefer the old fashioned score, but isn't that why we have computers? we can easily convert it to another form of notation to benefit other types of instruments too.
But the most logical explanation of something should always be kept as the starting point to extract the less useful information.

My opinion (having not used musical scores as much as you obviously have) points out both trackers and sequencers as having a vastly improved way of notating music.

No need to have opinions. Let's verify it.

I word, I created a 3-column document containing arbiturary text. Sitting an appropriate distance (for playing an arbiturary instrument) from this paper, I would say that Times New Roman 8-pt is the smallest font you can get away with and still be able to read the letters.

Given that, I get 118 rows with 3 columns, or a total of 354 total rows. If each row is a microbeat, and the music uses 16th notes, you need at least 64 rows per measure. In total, you can fit 5.5 measures onto one sheet. Even if you go down to 8th notes per microbeat, you're still looking at only 11 measures on an entire page.

By contrast, I've seen 12 measures on a single line using a printed staff, depending on the contents of the measures. If you shrink the size of the music down some (to the point of legibility), I wouldn't be surprised to see 16 measures on a single line.

The standard tracker form of displaying music is terrible in terms of space efficiency. Just look at it: a whole note (given the above) takes the same room as 64 16th notes. By contrast, a whole note takes far less room than a measure of 16th notes in a staff view.

The common band score has 8 measures per page, but it also displays the music for every instrumental part in that same page. Let's see a tracker view pull off 8 measures for 16-20 parts legibly (at, say, 3 feet away), with all modifiers (tempo, duration, etc), and with multiple notes/chords possible.

It's funny; I know of precisely 2 instruments that span 8 octaves: the piano and the guitar. Most instrument only have a 3-4 octave range. Usually, they pick a clef and stick with it. As such, for composing instrumental music, the staff view is perfectly fine.

Now, if you're making up instruments, or just screwing around with samples, or whatever, that's a different issue. Musical notation was made for actual instruments, not invented sounds. That it handles this case non-optimially is unimportant. Note that even a grand staff with many lines above and below lets it have more room than a tracker view.

I have a lot of objections to that statement, but I'll start with the second part. Why do you say that it only benefits string instruments? I can't even see how it benefits a string instrument more than any other type of instrument?

Music notation is old - many hundered years - but it's younger than text notation. It is true that it also is more complex than text notation (I know - as a music teacher it's my job to teach people to read it), but that is beacuse it contains more information.

It is a very efficent way of describing music beacuse of it's graphic nature. Anyone, including people who know practically nothing about music notation, can look at it and instantly tell if the music goes up or down. A string of numbers and letters needs to be decoded before you can get that information. Someone familiar with the notation can sing a melody that's written down even if they've never heard it before. The graphical notation makes that a lot easier than if one just gets a list of note names (which is what tracker notation basically is). You can see the intervals. Music notation is intuitive.

As has been previously argued, it's also more compact. There can be a lot of information in a piece of sheet music. A trained person can look at an orchestra score and instantly get an idea what the music sounds like. I really doubt that even the most experienced tracker could get that kind of quick overview from a printed sheet of tracking notation.

--

Bruce: Nice. Some constructive critisism, in case you'd like it: The inital melody is good, but I think you should take a second look at the snare drum. The flute that comes next also sounds a bit odd, and that also goes for the next section with the clarinet. I really like what comes after that, all the way to the end. (Not very detailed comments, I just wanted to point where you should listen one more time with a fresh ear.)

tracker notation has a rhythmic starting point, whilst the typical notation starts out from tonal, squishing the notes into a smaller space, so depending on how complex the piece is, it will become larger/smaller.
This makes it not at all suitable for instruments such as drums, that are not in any way concerned about tone, rather about timing, since it is the timing that in this case gets graphically displayed.
I know there is a special drummers notation, but what I mean is that timing is an issue for other instruments too, and the old notation is not very intuitive for describing it since the size of measures is variable.

In tracker notation it is always the same size as initially chosen.

Looking at the staff notation created from a typical midi tune, you can clearly see the trouble the program has to go through to display it accurately, they don't usually look like your average notation, they'll be using very wide measures, several clefs and clearly take more space than a tracked tune will.
Of course an instrumental player will probably choose to change or remove some of the material for the sake of space and readability, of what he considers non-useful musical content.
Or maybe given that it doesn't even look like a typical staff note, it cannot even be played back by a single live musician...

I don't know, maybe this is the case of the notation, optimised for what one person can play.

I tend to get crazy with 1/16 arpeggios and such, which clearly are not suitable for live music.

I think we can agree that staffs are optimal for orchestras, and that the tracker view is optimal for sample playback since it will contain mostly rhythmic events.

It's strange that you should bring up rythm. I thought about mentioning that as another major advantage in traditional music notation, but I thought my post was big enough already. The music is more readable beacuse it uses different sumbols for different lengths of the notes. The system is excellent for rythm.

If you want a complex rythm in tracking notation, you have to have a really big resolution. Consider placing seven notes in the space of four. Or something as simple and common as triplets! In order to have 8th triplets, you have to be able to put six notes each quarter. But then you probably want to have 16th notes too. Then we have to up the resolution to 12 places every 4th, making it harder to get an overview (#1 problem with trackers). This also makes the rythms harder to read, since it's not as obvoius to see how many spaces there are between each note as it is to see if a note has one or two flags.

(Interesting knowledge: There is a reason there are five lines in a standard note system. It's beacuse that's the number of lines the human mind most easily can distugish between.)

Yes, but put together they can also give a good overview of (for example) a full symphony orchestra. I'd like to see you try to make sense of a tracker rendition of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. That's very complex music, but even a person with just basic music notation knowledge could get the basic rythms, melodies and structure from the score. (I love the groove in the strings about 4 minutes into the piece. )

No, we can't. Sorry. But if the tracking view works for you, then it works for you. That we can agree on.

http://www.me.berkeley.edu/cpl/pictures/flame_ani2.gif Flame!http://www.me.berkeley.edu/cpl/pictures/flame_ani2.gif Flame!

I went to HammerSound, & went to [sounds > Soundfont Library > Collections > Gort's_Synth v2], & I got a zip with a .SF2 in it. What's that? It's not recognised as anything by MODPlug.

Note: Never heard of a soundfont.

BTW, my 2 cents on the tracker vs stave debate:

Staves are good for people to understand & write quickly, but staves require ‘common sense’ which is too complex for a computer to handle well. That is, every single stave system I've used on a comp has been woefully user unfreindly. (Apart from Sibelius, which was meerly fiddly.)

Trackers, on the other hand, may be harder to read by a person, but have a logical way of being inputted & handled by a computer. This makes them better suited for making MIDs, MODs etc, but I still think staves are better for sheet music (speaking from ~4 years violin experience).

I bet you downloaded Gorts Synth because it's the smallest SF2 on the site Actually it's a very good sound font it's just that it isn't a standard collection of samples as you might expect. Instruments in that particular sound font (and some others) are just instructions on how the sound card should synthesize sounds using some basic waveforms and lots of filters and effects. To get a real sound font I recommend you download one of the big ones (Reality is my favourite and "only" 32 megs) or the individual instruments.

EDIT:
Don't use ModPlug to rip instruments out of the sound font, it will do a terrible job. I recommend you use Awave Studio instead.

What program have you been using? Even that painful-to-use Melody Assistant (shareware) program can load .mid files and display them using pretty reasonable notation. I opened up a few .mid files I had lying around and found that I could get 12 separate instruments on screen while displaying an average of 5 measures of each.

Note that Melody Assistant does a really crappy job of spacing measures, and it still displays more information than the common tracker. Also, .mid files aren't necessarily a good test, since they can do some very notationally unorthadox and strange things. Certainly, the multiple parts on one track constantly confounds Melody Assistant.

Also, keep in mind that, when you look at multiple instruments, it has to display the notation as a score. That means all corresponding measures have the same size, so if you have 128 32nd notes in one measure and the one above it has just a whole note, then the whole note measure is going to look empty. Also, beats have to happen on the same vertical lines.

And I, for one, don't deny that proper notation is difficult to write into code. Just because you haven't used a program that does a decent job of it doesn't mean that it isn't possible or rewarding.

As I am currently writing a staff-based music editor, what, in particular, did you find lacking or difficult in editing music with a staff view?

You recall that .mid files don't actually contain samples. Instead, they refer to instrument #x, where x is 0-127. It is up to the midi player to determine what instrument #x sounds like.

A soundfont provides samples for instruments. Sometimes, a .mid file will come with a soundfont attached (though not embedded in the file), so that the way the music sounds will be more like what the creator intended.

Hmm.. so now we have twisted ourselves around aye?

First you say that staves are more readable because you can instantly tell what position they are in, instead of having a symbol like [G-5] then you say that staves are rhythmically more readable since they use symbols instead of graphical representation?

Please make sense with your arguments, staves are in no way good for rhythm, and that's that, any drummer will tell you this.

I think you maybe misunderstood, I'm currently using the most popular music composition package, it has no trouble whatsoever in converting midi into notation.
What I mean is that a typical midi tune will often contain information beyond a typical staff note, since there are much less limitations for an electronic composer.
If a composer has no limitations to think about, the staff will look horrible, which shows to prove my point that they are deprecated.

Korval:
Not a prob with the program or anything
It's just that staff view in musical apps only appeals to people who have used it very much previously, or if converting from paper by hand.
It just isn't logical at all, and feels very limiting.
So you should concentrate on making it feel as authentic as possible for those who already feel at home writing staves.

I've been using midi for music since 1986, and quite frankly, never had the need to try out all the shareware stuff out there. (nor was my sequencer a pc in the the beginning)
I recognise the hobby to compose music and prefer to pay for quality software.
Although tracking still remains the best alternative for live computer generated music, and is also very useful to make sampled drum patterns for any other software.

midi files are probably the most important form of notation today...

You misunderstand me (on purpose?). What I said about rythm was that it's easier to distinguish between an 8th note and a 16th note than seeing the exact space between two locations (which is what you have to do if you don't use rythmic symbols). This is especially true for more complex rythms. The graphical element is still there too, it's not as if the symbols are randomly chosen.

This does in no way mean the I have twisted myself around. The comparision with [G-5] is strange at best. Compare [F-3] with [B-6]. At a quick glance they look the same and yet they are widely different tones.

The tracking notation works for what it is intended to do, and it might even be a notation that suits you perfectly, but your claim that it represents music in a more efficent or better way than traditional notation is unfounded.

Any drummer will tell me that? No. Normal music notation is widely used among percussion too.

--

I am still curious as to why you early in the thread said that "The notation format ... only benefits string instruments in its design." You never did explain that statement, and I'd be interested in knowing what you meant.

"I bet you downloaded Gorts Synth because it's the smallest SF2 on the site ;)"

Yeah, I wasn't sure what a soundfont was (still aren't), so just wanted something small.

"Don't use ModPlug to rip instruments out of the sound font, it will do a terrible job."

As I said in my last post, I don't know what a soundfont is, or how to ‘rip’ one with MODPlug. MODPlug doesn't seem to recognise it as anything.

"I recommend you use Awave Studio instead."

Link?

Come on. Tracker views are horrible for rhythm. The simple fact that you can see the start of a note without knowing how long it will last is a testiment to that.

Remember, you can't play a note until you know how long it's going to last.

As someone who actually can play an instrument, it would be impossible to walk down some kind of track view and figure out the length of every note and convert that into a rhythm. Remember, in a track view, notes don't have length. You have to instead find the next note, which could very well be on the next page (especially considering you're only looking at a few measures on a page anyway).

Not only that, let's see you try counting lines at 120 bpm, while still parsing the next note's pitch and converting it into a fingering pattern for your instrument of choice, so that you can tell what the duration of a note is.

Once again, not as a computer playing music, but as an actual player of an instrument, it is imperitive that any viable notational scheme provide both pitch and duriation immediately. I need this information so I can get ready to play the next note. Tracker views just don't provide this information.

Except, of course, me. How many actual drummers have you asked, btw? I can't imagine that many of them would like to be presented with a tracker view rather than a standard music staff.

Note that my previous arguments about page size still stand: even if you only fit 2 measures on a line (which requires a poor notation program and very complicated rhythms), you still get 12 lines, which gives you more measures than the tracker view gives you only 5.5 measures. More measures is better. After all, a drummer who is playing can't exactly reach up and flip to the next page.

As I said, I opened up a bunch of midi files on mine, and none of them went abnormally far above/below the Treble/Bass clefs. Besides, even if they do, there is musical notation for those notes: 8va means raise this an octave higher than drawn. That way, you don't need a bunch of lines or lots of staff room. If your program doesn't support 8va, that's its fault, not the notation it is attempting to emulate.

Also, real instruments can't go too high above treble or too low below bass. If I recall, the flute/piccalo has a dynamic range extending only 8va above the C 2 lines above the Treble clef (C6, btw). That makes C7 the highest reasonable note to be using at all.

That all depends on it's design goals. So, let's design a musical notation format.

The goals for this format are the following:

1: Fit as much information on the page as possible (ease of play and composition).
2: Both rhythm and pitch are immediately avaliable from a note (ease of play).
3: Breaks a sequence of notes into small pieces for easy navigation.

#1, pretty much, rules out any text-based format. Image glyphs can be made smaller than text and still be legible. Also, it necessitates a format that makes music sections small when they have no need to be large. For example, a measure containing little information (say, a whole note or a whole rest) should be condensed down quite small.

#2 requires that the symbols show duration information. That means that a lone symbol has a particular duration.

Now, if you look at the design goals, you find that ease of play is integral among them. However, most things that make playing music easy also makes composing that music easier. So, generally, what falls out is that the notation format that fulfills these goals is good for both playing and writing.

Maybe to you, but that doesn't apply to real-world composers.

Besides, midi isn't even a reasonable notation format. It lacks the... imprecision of actual staff notation. Rather than encoding a "forte", it has a precise volume. And it doesn't even get such simple details like crescendo/decrescendo right.

For those looking for samples:
http://www.kiarchive.ru/pub/misc/sounds/samples/ft2/
Be forewarned: they're all in .xi format (although ModPlug Tracker can convert them for you), and many of them are quite large (16-bit by 44.1khz).

That makes the assumption that all the instrument samples in a piece are centered at middle C, which, while it's the right way of doing things, rarely happens in a MOD.

Many trackers have some basic features built in, such as highlighted text every quarter note, chord editors, and the like, that are supposed to help you with this. Of course, that doesn't prevent newbs from releasing amusingly bad modules, but they're there if one wants to use them.

While we're (sort of) on the topic of mods, I offer these humble examples of what can be done with them:
http://www.modarchive.com/cgi-bin/download.cgi/I/illegal0.xm
http://www.modarchive.com/cgi-bin/download.cgi/I/illegal8.xm
http://www.modarchive.com/cgi-bin/download.cgi/F/forsomeonespecial.xm

No, you come on, this is getting silly, a notes length has no meaning for a drummer,
The velocity is a much more important factor, which of course cannot be described by a typical staff.
That is why there is a widely used thing called "Drummers notation" which resembles hmm...
Horizontal tracker notation?

Actually I think trackers have the most straight-forward way of describing starts and endings of a note, since there is no question that the note will end if another instrument occupies the same channel, or if there is a "note end" symbol there.

Real world composers? what real world composers have you talked to? your friends at Sony music? Virgin records? Nobuo Uematsu? Please tell
I have some insite on what happens in the "real world of composers" and it states clearly that many symphony orchestras and other people who oppose the introduction of digital in music, are dying, due to impopularity.
Last time I spoke to what's his name in metallica he said that he doesn't like computers nor mp3, and that his associates would try and make sure those kinds of tools never made it into their studios.
They opposed mp3, and look, how a lot of people stopped buying their records, I'm sure they are eating up those very words right now.
I haven't seen their studio, but bet it's filled with the latest digital equipment.

The point to me telling this is that sometimes things need an overhaul even if you love them, since we need to keep up with always rising expectations.

MIDI has all information required to make orchestral music and more advanced music, or why have so many symphonies been created using midi?
The note start/stop, velocity, volume, timing, accent, bend, A/D/S/R etc. are all there, there is nothing else required to describe musical content.
The only things needed to add to this is the perfect information of how the instrument itself is supposed to sound.
Just because midi doesn't tell a guitarist to get ready to put his fingers in a certain place, doesn't make it worse, since this information can be extracted anyways.
Don't blame the format if you intend to write imperfect music, the format is flawed if there can be discrepancies about how a sound should be played.

This sounds too much like the all too common discussions about midi vs. mod
mod has almost the same kind of capabilities, except it forces you to use the same timing throughout the song (with tempo changes this isn't a limitation), this could be fixed in the future, or using a mod view for midi is practical too.
The formats in no way clash with eachother, and together they create major success.
(step sequencers etc)

In general, I don't have a problem with .mod formats (except for the instrument and channel limitations). I find the basic concept of the .mod format, music information bound to instrument samples, to be the best way to create music. It lets you know precisely how the music will sound to the end user.

I fully expect my music editor to export to a .mod-type format; it'll even have instrument editing capabilities (though this might come from a back-end plugin application).

My problem has always been with .mod editors.

I always wanted a feature to have the option to change the pitch of an instrument without changing the length, although pitch shifting is very cpu intensive for quality, it could create amazing results, much more needed than any other effect.
Currently I need to load the file into logic audio, edit the pitch and sometimes even make it into a multisample for fasttracker.

Otherwise I'm happy with 32 channels and 256*16 instruments (which the XM format allows)
since I only use it for programs and recording sequences, I rarely ever wanna go over 10 channels (cpu usage)
But of course using it to create music without the need to care about the power for playback this can be extremely limiting.

Given the current structure of almost all (except recent) mod types, having too many channels will bring the volumes too low (very bad quality mixing too)
So more channels would only be practical if channels were made to allow "peaking", which they currently can't.
This is a choice you make when you enter the higher end of music apps, leveling becomes a much more apparent problem, and always needs many more hours of work.

the amount of instruments wouldn't ever bother me, but some people somehow just manage to run out of them...
Dunno why they did it, probably to make menus smaller and easier to access.

Actually, it can. You can use either precise beats-per-minute, or more imprecise (and, in general, preferable) speed designations.

Besides, for a drummer, the speed isn't necessarily the most important issue; it's the rhythm. And that is already described by the note lengths.

Oh, you're talking about drum sets. In that case, that's not playing one instrument; that's playing lots. So, having a different notational scheme is expected.

First, it may be a straight forward way of describing the duration of a note, but, as with many things, the straight-forward way isn't necessarily the best way. It just takes up way too much room.

As an example, take programming using "vi" as the primary editor.

I'm told by many who swear by vi that it is a great editor. They explain that vi allows them to move around a text document without touching a mouse. And this is, basically, the primary reason to use vi. It is not straightforward to use. It is not simple. It is complicated, but it fullfills its design goal very well: it keeps your hands on the keyboard.

If keeping my hands on the keyboard were a concern for me when choosing an editor, then I would use vi, regardless of whether or not it is straightforward. It'll only take a month to a year, and it fullfills one of my concerns with an editor: keeping my hands on the keyboard (granted, I don't use vi because I spend well over half of my programming time thinking rather than typing, but that's beside the point).

The same is true here. Am I saying that western notation is perfect? No, it probably isn't. However, it is very good at what it does, and it is far superior to any tracker view in terms of both playing the music (with instruments) and composing it. The entry fee for learning it may be a bit steep, but the overall benifits outweigh the costs.

Second, what if you have multiple parts on the same staff? Or, better yet, a piano where one hand is playing one set of notes while the other is playing something else. This would typically be a chord or something simple, but not necessarily always. Once again, we come back to the basic illegibility of the tracker view; it simply takes too much room to display something that a staff view can in far less space (which is a statement that I note that you no longer attempt to refute).

Remember, the visual display of music is intended to make music easier to play and/or compose. What happens under the hood is of little consequence or importance.

True or false, this is a non-sequitor. The acceptance or avoidance of digital music by orchastral performers has nothing to do with the thrust of this conversation. We're talking about visual notation, not digital music.

Off topic, but:

I'm sure that the drop in popularity of Metallica has nothing to do with recent shifts in popular music, or the end of a fad/beginning of a new one, or people stealing their music via MP3's online. No, it must be because they oppose MP3's.

/sarcasm

See my last reply.

Though I would like to know if the final presentation of these orchastras are really intended to be in .mid, or is that just a convienient tool for the composer to get an idea of what it would sound like? My guess would be the latter, much more so than the former.

This is really getting off-topic, but I have to ask:

You aren't, by chance, one of those people who actually believes that orchastras and other live performances will, eventually, give way to computer performances, are you? I hope not; otherwise it shows a glaring lack of understand of, not only music, but the vast differences between even a mere recording and a live performance.

You can imitate the sounds, but you can't recreate the performance. And if you can't do that, then it's not going to replace actual live performances.

Standard musical notation is imprecise by design. It isn't that way just because there wasn't something better. A piece of music isn't great simply because of who wrote it; it must also be conducted and performed. Each performance of a piece of music is unique; imparting the character not only of the composer, but of the players and the conductor. To say that this imprecision is somehow a detriment to music simply shows a lack of understanding of the artform itself.

Velocity has nothing to do with tempo, it is an estimate of how hard the drummer should hit his drum or pianist strike his keyboard.

Drums are an instrument, one, two or fifty pads, it doesn't matter, the notation should fit it.
You assume that all music uses western tonal instruments, but there are almost equally many that use only rhythmic structures.
Not to talk about the totally different toned chinese and arabic styles of music..
now where does western notation stand in this? oh I forgot it is "western notation" thus one amongst many.
MIDI covers them all, so do trackers, are we through yet?

About the unix text editor "VI" I think it's an evil program from hell and wish it burnt in a public place.
once you accidentally open it, it won't even let you exit without giving you a crash course in it's user friendliness (ie. a bunch of ~ ~ ~ ~ on the screen) a "killall -9 vi" each 2 minutes as a cronjob, works nicely.

Nobody wants to learn a keyboard only text editor, I have a million other programs that offer much easier keyboard shortcuts, more features, while still being easy to use, and exit on ctrl+c gracefully too.

people don't need months or years to learn a tracker, I already completed my first tune within a few hours.
it is a property of a program having logical behaviour, mostly dependent on the gui.
Fasttracker is not considered to have one of the best designed guis for nothing, the speed at which most people work it out has yet to be seen in another program.

As I said, depending on the type of music you want to notate, either tracker type notation or staff will be smaller on an A4
if drums are included I can guarantee the space needed for tracker type notation will be smaller.

Both actually, like our friend Nobuo Uematsu (FF music composer) for example, created the music using midi, which was later converted into mod-style format for playback on snes

Many symphonists simply don't care to use their own orchestra anymore, they'll just create a tune using midi, send the file to an orchestra who will record it for him, then release an album.

Depends on what you mean by computer performances I suppose.
last year, I was with 2000 normal youngsters who'd probably fall asleep watching an orchestra play a classical symphony, they were all wound up by some guys who had a performance of music using 3 C64 computers and playing weirdo music, partly live, partly sequenced.

writing a staff is exactly like painting with oil colours, the material is limited into that existance, if digitised it can be made better, or it could be done digitally from the start avoiding all the limitations therefore giving more freedom to the artform.
of course now people will argue that the oil painting has more "value" for some reason, but hey, I'm not saying you can't do it, I'm just saying that I won't bother to travel all the way there to see it, since that difference is insignificant to me and most people, digital is probably the way it will be viewn in most cases anyways.

The market for these kinds of live things is shrinking rapidly, since people can bring these experiences home, using something called a "CD" or "Computer".

Aren't you guys forgetting that the purposes of tracker-notation and staff-notation are diffent?

the staff was created god knows when, the tracker notation somewhere in the 80's.

The purpose of the notations are so different that you can't really compare them.

The tracker notation was created in the amiga days to represent the 4 hardware channels on the 'Paula' sound chip. Ever since then, the tracker notation has been oriented to simplify handling the limited polyphony available. Well, recently when cpu power has increased dramatically, the polyphony no longer is a problem and notes can be played on 'virtual channels' bound to 'control channels', i.e. the ones you see on your tracker screen.

The tracker notation is simple to learn, but someone who's used staffs all his life has a hard time understanding it. Example: My cousin and i once tracked some classical tune (whose name i can't remember, it had something to do with goblins or gremlins or something) into something.. much different. He couldn't understand the tracker screen at all. He's been playing the piano for about 12 years now. I had the staff but i couldn't understand that. We wound up translating that staff to the tracker by him telling what note and how long (see, i'm a tracker oriented person so i don't include the lenght to the note, i use noteoffs ) it played and me tracking it down.

Granted, you can't play violin from a printed out sheet of tracker notation.

Tracker notation is a whole different approach to writing down the stuff. It shouldn't be compared to staff. More like to the event list of some midi sequencers. Actually the way Scream Tracker 3 compressed the pattern data when saving made the pattern columns into "event lists", i.e., not storing the empty lines.

E-4 5 32 ...
... . 01 ...
... . 32 ...
C-3 . 01 G20

Why even bother trying to play an instrument from that? You'd lose your sanity trying.

But i dare to claim that for the totally inexperienced person who has never tried to write or read any notation whatsoever, the tracker notation is easier to understand.

The tracker notation matches the inexperienced's way of thinking when writing music. It does match mine, anyway, and i tried sequencers first.
The pro doesn't think this way, though.

About using live musicians...

Yes, the digital part of the composing process is here to stay (though I know composers that prefer not to use a computer) but it's probably safe to say that most composers use programs with score notation. Many use notation programs, where the MIDI playback only is intended to be a help in hearing how it will sound. In those programs, the final product isn't intended to sound like the MIDI output.

Drummers: Yes, I can see how that kind of notation can be useful, maybe even more so than classical notation, in special circumstances. Drums in pop/rock genre being your example, and you can probably find a couple more. However, as a general notation format, it is still inferior. I can give examples of percussion pieces without tone height that are better notated in traditional notation, beacuse it is better at notating rythm.

Different scale systems: I don't know what an traditional arabic music notation looks like, but I can say that tracking notation isn't better suited to notate that music than our standard western notation. Trackers are also based on a small second being the smallest interval between two tones. There are ways to cicumvent that, but that exists in normal notation too.

I don't recall articulation being part of the MIDI standard. You'd have to make those marks by hand, by lengthening or shortening notes manually. Slurs, a very important, and useful, notation, aren't in MIDI eitehr. There are any number of vital notational markings that are not covered by the MIDI standard.

As I said, I don't disagree.

However, the point I was making is that, for a text editor designed to make keyboard navigation powerful, it works well. Now, neither you nor I see any real benifit to that. But, for those who actually see a benifit in that, VI is a good program.

The way this connects to notation is that, for the stated design goals for a notational scheme that enhances instrumental playability and ease of composing, western notations works very well.

Your guarentee is false. I've seen dozens of .mid files converted into notation, including the drum track, and not one has been limitted to a mere 11 measures per page, which is what the tracker view would take. In fact, thanks to the rhythmic needs of the drum track (32nd notes, so a measure is 128 lines), the tracker view can display less than 5 measures per page, while the notation view can, even in the space-poor Melody Assistant, can still show 15-20 measures on a page.

It's more likely that Nobuo either had an SNES audio emulator to work with, or he had a dev-kit with special editing software so he could work with the chip itself. Oh, he might use some external program to get the basic score, but he would have to make sure that it sounds precisely the way he wants it to in the SNES's SPC700. An actual .mid file was likely never involved.

Unless, of course, you believe that a mere .mid file can produce anything even remotely similar to Thanatos's music in Secret of Mana.

First, I don't think the concept of a composer who doesn't directly conduct the orchastra that plays his/her music is anything new.

And I seriously doubt any orchastra can reasonably play a MIDI file without human intervention. Take basic articulation, for example.

MIDI doesn't have articulation. However, the program the composer used to make this file probably does. Therefore, what ultimately happened is that the program had to convert the articulation into actual changes to the note lengths/volume. That means that a staccoto quarter note looks, in the MIDI file, more like an eighth note (or smaller) than a quarter note.

What this means is that, when someone loads the MIDI file into a notation program (so they can print out a score for an orchastra), what they will see is either a complete lack of articulation, or they will see very strange notes.

An unarticulated quarter-note, for example, isn't really supposed to last for a quarter of the measure. Instead, it would be written more precisely as a double-dotted eight note. Only a legato quarter note lasts the full quarter measure. A good notation-to-MIDI converter will convert un-articulated quarter notes to notes with a duration slightly less than a full quarter measure.

What this means is that, when loaded later, you don't see quarter notes; you see a bunch of double-dotted eight notes. Now, a human has to go through and replace all these odd notes with real one combined with articulation.

Note that there aren't even jump instructions in MIDI, so something as simple and fundamental as DC Al Coda can't be directly implemented in the format. A human would have to go through and do some pattern matching to find out where the Coda was and re-notate the entire score to apply the DC Al Coda.

More likely than tossing MIDI files around, the composer and the conductor agree on a notation program, and the composer sends a file to the conductor in that program. An actual .mid file is likely never involved.

On dynamic range, which is the only moderately valid argument you've made, I'd like to point out that, if super-high or super-low notes become useful, all you need is a new clef or two, and, quite easily, they fall right back into line.

Next, I'd like to point out that the human ear has a certain dynamic range that it can hear. I don't know what the range is, but I would imagine that C10 is probably really close to it. Obviously anything outside of this range is useless in terms of making music of any kind.

Lastly, as far as dynamic range and sound manipulation is concerned, I'd like to know one thing: those MOD pieces that you state use lots of very high or very low notes. Do they really use 7000Hz sound frequencies or 22Hz sound frequencies, or are the samples simply improperly tuned?

What I mean is this. In a MOD, when making a sample, you give it a .wav file and you tell it what the base pitch of the .wav is. If the base pitch of the .wav was really, say, 55Hz, and you tell it that this is A4 (440 Hz), you're going to use a lot of 8 and 9 octave notes to get sounds that are in the mid-to-upper-mid dynamic range.

Also, you say, "if digitised it can be made better," that's the fundamental problem: digital isn't better analog. You may think it is, but that doesn't make it so.

Our only real problem with analog signals is that recording and playing them kept introducing noise and artifacts. This is due to our recording and playback mechanisms, not to anything fundamentally related to analog signals. I predict that the current audio "digital revolution" will revert to an analog revolution once we find a good means of recording, storing, and playing true analog signals.

And what "limitations" are you refering to?

People said that records and radio would kill live performances too. They were wrong then, and they're wrong now. Live performances might not be as big a deal as they once were, but they will never go away.

Saying that a recording is anything close to a live performance is like saying that, because I can see a picture of the Mona Lisa, I have no reason to see the real thing. Or that, because I can take a video tour of the International Space Station, I shouldn't want to go there. In all of these cases, the imitation always pales in comparison to the reality.

Why do you think people pay the money they do to see their favorite bands on tour? It isn't just the crowd or the on-stage show.

A live performance is always better because the music will be subtly different. Maybe you have a different conductor than the recording you've lived with. You, almost certainly, have different players, who are going to interpret the music slightly differently. All this comes together to create a unique experience.

Not only that, I hate to point this out, but both CD's and Computers are digital devices; real sound is analog. No matter what you do, information will be lost in this conversion. I once knew someone who prefered tapes to CD's because, he claimed, that he could hear the "digitality" of the CD.

You seem to live in this arena of "digital music," where music is produced from sound samples (not necessarily of real instruments). Regardless of my opinion on this arena, attempts to project it onto the larger world of composition simply fail. It's a big world of music, and digital music is only a small (and very underground) part of it.

It is not needed since this kind of functionality is done automatically by something called "midi file editors"

Steep learning curves have to be justified by results, and in my opinion this is not valid for a mere text editor, maybe emacs serves a better example.

An audio suite will have a lot of keyboard commands, and a few of them not even reachable via menu, learning them takes a few days, but the end is justified since you are dealing with ~80 tracks of mixed midi/audio/sampler/mixer tracks and everything is so advanced, that you probably wouldn't get by without reading a manual anyways.

I sincerely do not see the need for such a high learning curve in notation, which in fact only covers the equivalence to editing one tiny midi track in this huge audio editing software.
It is only such a small part of the full production cycle that it should be made as easy as possible.
And it already has, the western notation parts included are for backwards compatibilty.

An above type of music suite can easily be used to create fully valid notation knowing nothing about it.
the result from that is of course very useful for western music, but that is still just a very small part of the world of music and when the time comes to mix it with something else the notation must be traded for a more flexible option such as midi.

Do you honestly think that Nobuo used his favourite hex editor or had a squaresoft made tracker style interface to create these tunes, instead of using his comfy sequencer/keyboard setup and letting a hardcore coding dood do the tech parts for him?
The almost complete sets of general midi patches found in at least FF4,5,6,7 and 8 should be enough to testify for the usage of midi in the creation of these pieces and even most of the sfx found in the games are GM.

Of course, it is only logical to dump redundant data, the viewer should take care of this.

MIDI being a streaming format of course has no reason to support jumps, jumps into what?
This is a data compression issue, not a musical one.
It would just make processing much more difficult for a format that needs to be used in realtime anyway.
If you need compression, then encapsulation is the answer.

This is again, a high end and low end software difference. Shareware coders haven't got the time nor the effort to satisfy all needs, thus they will quickly hack together their own fileformat instead of complying with an existing one, whilst professional software does the job much better using midi.

True, but this makes it much harder to read, prototyping is important for readability.

Obviously this is a freedom created for sample reusage, but also a keyboard may need to be split, especially for live performances.

Aural pleasure is a mysterious thing, sometimes you need to add a high pitched sound to get rid of an annoyance in a lower pitched one.

What pitch would you give the sound of the seashore?

Digital uses logic, need I say more?

If you can defy the laws of physics, and decrease the amount of resistance in materials and background noise, for all means, go ahead.

Things that a live band cannot play, things that don't quite make the conversion into western notation.

Atari 2600 games are still alive and well with emulators, do people still make them or earn money on them?

Reality is sometimes a dissapointment.

To get pissed, scream and to actually see the bandmember they have wet dreams about

I agree, lemon or strawberry topping on my chocolate icecream? Oh! it's a surprise?
or you could just listen to another band for variation.
This is what remixes are about though.

The same amount of information is lost by passing it through another foot of cable or 10cm of air
ie. insignificant

It is funny you should say that, since I haven't heard any live music for years (apart from the occasional jams in studio), some of the people I know have probably never been to a real concert.
The reality for most people is that they wanna listen to music while working or doing something else, not pay $120 then run down to a big concert hall, it just isn't an option, record it on a disc and send it to them, period.
Or I take that back, I could imagine going there with a date, but of course it wouldn't be solely for the sake of the music since I'd be busy doing something else like getting my hands down her panties.

I work together with mainstream musicians sometimes, people who actually make money, and reality is quite different to what you describe, it's a dog eat dog world, either you stay informed about the latest techniques and stay on top of the market, or you ponder about possible flaws in the midi implementation and go under. The big concert halls you describe, expensive hand-made instruments and directors with those silly curly tupés are a relic of the past, a minority, still there for the sake of nostalgia.
Hundreds of different underground music movements are now within the domain of digital music.

An everyday scenario in the current world of music:
I have a master which is deadlined since a week back, the company tells me that one of the tracks is missing some "phatness" and refuse to label it. Would you go and quickly collect your orchestra and set up that major scene with all those costs involved?
With digital material, take some tracks, patch them through an RMS normalise then a tube-style compressor and voila, noone can possibly hear the difference (except it obviously sounding better).
This goes for all types of popular music.

Tomorrow I'm going to a concert for the first time in years, and I know for a fact that they use midi for storage of all their material, then listen to it while looking and memorising for playback.
western notation is probably not even an option since they play arabic music, which will sound much better on a DX7 than on a western violin. The reason I'm going there is for charity, organised by the popular swedish Palestine foundation which opposes evil people such as Bush and Sharon...
So wish me luck! I'm going to a real live music event, yaay!

You seem to have missed the point, so I'll say it again. The fundamental UI design goal of VI is to make moving around a text document with the keyboard as powerful as possible. In this, you have to admit, they succeeded. As such, if that is a feature you consider important, then you should use VI.

Obviously neither of us consider this feature very useful, as neither of us use VI.

The same is true of music notation. If you consider ease of view, playing, and composing to be features that you consider important in notation, then a tracker view just doesn't stand up well compared to a staff view.

Obviously, being able to fit only 5.5 measures on a page is not good for either viewing or playing. And, in terms of composing, it barely shows a basic phrase. Being able to look at 8 measures without having to flip pages between them is better for composition.

Precisely. Which is why they include staff views. This is the easiest way to look at music in terms of playability and composition.

Have you ever tried to write a staff view program? This is not a simple matter, believe me. Certainly not nearly as simple as it seems just from looking at it. You don't include this feature as mere "backwards compatibility." This feature is, generally, the difference between low-end software and high-end software.

One of the reasons you can't see how invalid your arguments are is that you, apparently, simply haven't played music before. You are simply speaking from inexperience.

I've heard people argue vehemently against VC++ as an IDE. They talk up the benifits of Emacs, VI, or even notepad by comparison.

And yet, very few of these people seem to be involved in the kind of project that requires VC++: large-scale programming. VC++ is designed, not for somebody with a 30-file probject, but for a 1000+ file project where the average lines-per-file is 1000-2000. Where you may be coming onto the project in the middle or as a maintainance coder, and you have no idea where function/variable/class X is defined.

The same is true in this case: you only look at western notation in the form where it chaffs you, not the form where it really shines: composing and playing.

No, but that answer is obvious from reading what I wrote. You will note that I mentioned neither a hex editor nor a "tracker style interface". Now, I can only infer the reason you read these into what I said. I would presume that you believe that a .mod-type file format cannot be created from a normal staff-view interface; that it can only be built from a tracker interface or a hex editor.

Without question, Nobuo had access to either an emulator or a real SNES devkit. He may have been playing on his "comfy sequencer/keyboard setup", but the MIDI effects would have been converted and piped on the fly through the SPC700 chip/emulator. Otherwise, he wouldn't be able to know precisely how anything he was doing would sound.

Actually it testifies more to these two facts:

1) Nobuo used real instruments in his sound data.
2) General MIDI is composed of real instruments.

Nobuo is an orchastral composer. What else would he use besides real life instrument samples?

I'm afraid I fail to see how articulation data (or even lack thereof) is redundant. This is a part of the music data, just as much as the base length (quarter note), its pitch, and the current volume.

Nice try. You're attempting to avoid the fact that MIDI is a lossy format compared to actual notation.

Explain precisely how MIDI retains articulation/looping information that can then be read and interpreted by another program. Prove to me that there exists high-end software that can apply articulation into a MIDI file in such a way as to be able to retrieve it later perfectly. Prove to me that high-end software can apply a slur to a region of music, save it in MIDI, and reload it with that slur restored.

Assuming that this is an arbiturary sound sample rather than an instrument, I have to ask: why wasn't the "annoyance" removed from the low sample instead of adding an arbiturary high pitch?

I would put sound effects like that where they belong: on a percussion track. After all, much like many percussion instruments, it has no pitch.

If I had to assign it a pitch, I would give it A4, simply because this is the base frequency.

That statement is not logical. "Digital" is a concept; it cannot use something. Please clarify.

I have no idea why the contravention of the laws of physics is required (which law, in particular?), but decreased resistance is easy enough to swing. If you really need decreased resistance, use a superconductor.

I could understand working in a notation that didn't rely on 12 tones between octaves. These notational schemes exist. And they look nothing like a tracker view.

And, as far as things that a live band cannot play, I don't understand the problem. There's nothing in the notation that requres that it be played by real instruments, or instrument-like samples. An A#-5 can be played just as well by a flute sample as some arbiturary noise sample.

Both of these are not the same as hearing two different orchastras perform the same piece of music.

So, how do you explain what that person I described was hearing? He claimed to be able to tell the difference. Personally, unless there was actual aliasing happening (this was in 1994 or so), I have no idea what he was talking about.

There are always going to be enough people who appreciate music sufficiently to take in a concert every now and then.

And some forms of music just don't work well recorded. Take Jazz, for example. Every performance is unique. Improvisation is expected, if not required. Oh, sure, Jazz buffs may buy CD's of their favorite Jazz musicians, but when they come to town, those buffs will be there to hear their "current" version of these same songs.

Calling orchastral music a "relic of the past" shows complete and utter disdain for the art of music in general. They aren't there just for "nostalgia," Classical music, and orchastral music in general, is good music. I consider it to be the highest form of musical expression.

Not only that, symphony orchastras still exist and still make money. They may not be "popular," but that is ultimately unimportant. What takes place in the corporate world doesn't change the artform of music.

If you're talking about a 15-second song for some commercial, use whatever you want. But, if you're talking about the production of actual Art, that's different.

Which could be the reason why they can get away with MIDI. I have no knowledge of Arabic Musical Notation, so I can't say one way or the other if MIDI is lossless to it. However, I can say that MIDI is lossy for western notation.

That's just sad.

Ok! they have succeeded greatly in making moving text as powerful as possible,
I remember the good old days, when we had to open harddrives and move the bits individually to accomplish this.

Agreed

This argument is flawed in the way that you assume 2 things:
1. Tracker view is bad
2. Staff view is the center of the world

I do not want to argue with you about this anymore since it is quite obvious you made up your mind

You are entitled to your opinion, but the rest of the world needn't share it...
The most useable interface for all types of music is a matrix view.

The staff view is still just a drop in the ocean compared to the complexity of these programs, most people don't use it.
Difficulty in implementing a staff view, is the quantisation needed before showing, to approximate how much quantisation is needed is a bit difficult.

Conversion from Notes -> MIDI is smooth & straight forward
Conversion from MIDI -> Notes is much more difficult

Which did we say was the better container?

Yes, and that I'm having this argument with someone who just got his first violin as birthday present and is now trying to prove what his music teacher told him.
I could argue that my experience in music probably stretches more than 17 years, I started back when midi was just a buzz word and GM wasn't even thought of.

People hate things made by MS, it's human instinct. =)

These things go hand in hand, a company becomes big, counsil goes on vacation, middle-management gains upper hand and decides VC++ is probably good since we can make a deal with MS.
Surely I'd be working on a 1000 file 1-2k row file project on an MS OS, that is just torturing yourself, when a company becomes so big, it needs to move to a more mature OS like Solaris or Linux (depending on if they can use GPL or not).

I think western notation looks cool, and of course it's more fun if you switch editors once in a while too, like using staff instead of the matrix editor is a bit like switching fonts in documents, but not everything can be done in staff view, nor is it "better" or more readable than anything else.

Why would they go through all that trouble when it is much easier to create a midi converter.

devkits or not, that's besides the point, you clearly haven't been in contact with too many synths.
I know the GM set of instruments in and out, and you don't need to be a genius to hear that FF6 and roland sound scaringly alike.

His brain maybe?
I'm sure he was thinking: let's move the GrndPiano and the StringHit around, so we get them in the same order as GM.
They probably did a direct patch/sample dump from roland and deleted the unused ones.

No it is a name for a data structure, and does not need to be stored.
The viewer should show these kinds of things as necessary

This is not a difference between bmp and jpeg as it may seem to you.
MIDI stores notes with an accuracy of 1000 ticks per second, try that with staff.
I think it is just silly to discuss this, who do you think designed midi? mickey mouse?
The people who came with the clever and standard midi solution all probably used western notation earlier, they needed something better and more realistic, so they created midi.

I already said that MIDI is a realtime format, thus, there is no timecode.
SMPTE on the other hand is an addition of timecode. (with much higher accuracy)
it is standard midi subdata now.

Open logic audio, choose new midi track, open it in staff view, play some notes, choose the slur and add it from the left.

Because the annoyance only happens in that particular part of the song.
Would you retune your piano just because it doesn't sound good in conjunction with a bagpipe?

that's where you are wrong, all sounds have an average pitch, and depending on what it is mixed with, it is imperative to hear it.

Good way to make sure it gets played back at original pitch.

Tried making anything digital without logic?

Resistance, magnetism, background noise, radiation, static electricity.. do I need to continue?
Yes, I'll be keeping my instruments, cables and people in 0.1 degrees kelvin, any other bright ideas?
Resistance is the smaller issue, background noise the bigger, everything is magnetic, emits radiation, and collects static electricity.
I suggest you take a course in sound engineering if you need to learn more about these basic things.

There is absolutely no point to staff notating something if it isn't even gonna be played back with a live instrument or given to a computer illiterate person.

Honda and Hyundai are both not the same thing although they both use the same ideology of being cars and starting with H.

I've been able to tell the difference between CD/MD/K7/Vinyl, CDs have sharp edges whilst analogue techniques always sound a bit round (MD/MP3 music too for that matter),
Your friend was an imbecil, CD player DACs used to be very good in the beginning, but around 1990 the el cheapo CD players started coming, and your friend probably owned one of those. He is one of those people who takes cancer warnings in the newspaper seriously.
Did he own an 8cm reel-to-reel machine since he was so picky?

There are always going to be people who piss in the shower no matter how often you tell them not to.

yep, it's a slightly different kind of art, I think I was talking about this earlier?

It is outdated, old, as in no more fresh, it needs to renew itself if anyone is to be interested, just listen how Nobuo manages to renew it and make it listenable once again.

I guess we all have as much time and money as to pursue our hobbies to the fullest

so now it is a definition of art and not art?
I can tell you that there probably is an equal amount of effort going into a 15s commercial as 20 bars of classical music.

And no, I was not talking about commercials.

So already we have established that western notation could not ever be used by more than 20-30% of the worlds population.
That leaves us with only the alternative to look for a better underlying system for notation, like midi.

Your knowledge of MIDI is lossy.

We haven't established that. Is is possible to notate the smaller intervals found in arabic music with the traditional notation. Chinese music use a smaller number of tones than we do, so that's no problem at all notating that...

Midi is just as much based on western scales. More than that - it is based on the tempered scale, which means that each note is slightly off pitch. Our modern ears are used to that since all keyboard instuments since the 18th century has bee made that way, but a choir, strings or winds can create music with a better intonation. Yes, it is possible to do using midi and similar things, but not easy.

Mine is not, but judging from your posts it seems like your knowledge of music notation is. You don't have to learn it (much great music has been made by people who couldn't notate music in any way), but you shouldn't bash it if you don't know what you are talking about.

True, unless the composer is aided by having the notation. But the reverse can also be said: There is absolutely no point to putting music into music software if it is going to be played back with live instruments, unless it's an aid to the composer. In these cases, it all comes down to personal preference.

How about programs which use the MIDI standard as the base of their format? In the software I use, I can add all the articulation data (well, by typing it on the staff ) I want, but it doesn't alter playback in any way (logically).

I've tried a rather dedicated (and expensive) MIDI notation program though, which allowed me to add "standard" articulation and it affected the playback as well (iirc). This is very application-dependent though (as everyone just loves to have their own format(s) ) and everything will be lost if saved to a standard MIDI.

I currently use two programs to compose. The first one is used to create the skeleton of the song. The second one is then used to:

- add details like bends, volume changes, etc
- finalizing the song without any intention to make a staff out of it (since I don't have a live band or anything at my disposal ) - you could say "making it computer-playable", adding some "dirty hacks" to make it sound realistic

If I wanted spread out my staffs, I'd probably do this instead:

- use the first program to create the skeleton again
- since recording the playback isn't the first priority now, I don't have to add all the "dirty hacks" to emulate articulation and realism, I'd just use dedicated notation software to add details and finalize the staff

Of course, I'd like to have my arrangements (check "My Music" if interested) played on a real orchestra.

I reiterate:
http://www.me.berkeley.edu/cpl/pictures/flame_ani2.gif Flamewar!http://www.me.berkeley.edu/cpl/pictures/flame_ani2.gif Flamewar!

I seriously think this impending flamewar is unnecessary. Clearly none of you are going to let go of your ‘I'm right, I know I am’ views, so why are you arguing? I mean, ‘x is better than y’ is an opinion, not a fact, and opinions can differ from person to person. So stop trying to force your opinionated ideas on each other.

I know this post isn't going to make me any friends, but I think it's necessary considering the amount of BS posted so far. I mean, come on:

“There are always going to be people who piss in the shower no matter how often you tell them not to.”
“who do you think designed midi? mickey mouse?”
“Nice try.”
“I agree, lemon or strawberry topping on my chocolate icecream? Oh! it's a surprise?”
“The big concert halls you describe, expensive hand-made instruments and directors with those silly curly tupés are a relic of the past, a minority, still there for the sake of nostalgia.”
“Nobody wants to learn a keyboard only text editor”
“something called a "CD" or "Computer".”
“Please make sense with your arguments, staves are in no way good for rhythm, and that's that, any drummer will tell you this.”
“The notation format we still use is old and deprecated, and only benefits string instruments in its design.”

Grow up.

And Funklord: Note these are mostly yours.

PS: I'm killing this thread, as it has become a ridiculous, immature quarrel.

[edit]
Inphernic (caght me in mid-edit):
I know that. I just don't want anyone wasting their hot air (Even though there's no shortage here. ) flaming me, as I won't see it. I don't want to have to watch what I thought was a perfectly harmless discussion turn pyro.
[/edit]

PPS: Back to the actual point of THIS THREAD!!! :
Yuckyitall! >:(
Through my investigation of MOD I have been introduced to 7+ new file types, & I only know what 3 of them are (let alone understand them). MOD seems to require an unnecessary amount of baggage. I shall now delete MODplug & get a MIDI editor. >:(

PPPS: I feel like I started this. :'(

FYI: "Killing" a thread does not remove it from anywhere except your forum view.

He probably knew that. Anyway, it does seem to be an opinion war (with a lot of promoting opinion as fact) so a lock is probably in order.

whistles for Matthew

THIS IS THE LONGEST FORUM TOPIC I SEEN EVER!

however - about MODs...

MODules are in fact the best way of making music.
they provide high quality sound, aren't too big,
aren't taking too much CPU horsepower (if player is smart ofkoz)...

They grew on Amiga however there were tunes on C64
that are also modules... (Digital samples only or
DIGI with synthetic sound)

On PC first was ProTRacker (probably around 1988-89) which was clone of Amiga's protracker - the MOD format was exactly the same but later MODs on pc were extended...

Technically MOD is like MIDI but with samples
(Gravis Ultra Sound plays MIDI this way - via
sample patches!) instead of Sound Card's "built-in intruments"

that's all for now...

That's a negative. Modules are a fast and simple way of making music, but definitely not the best one. That's like saying that eJay is the ultimate composing application.

They provide high quality sound only if the samples are high quality (read: large). If the samples are high quality, the modules grow.

I currently have ~200Mb of samples mapped over my MIDI playback.

My previous defense for MIDI: http://www.allegro.cc/forums/view_thread.php?_id=189857

Irrelevant:
Ok.. maybe I went a bit overboard =(

But I can't stand it when people are judging out a format which is happily used by the mostpart of professional musicians.
It just proves lack of knowledge.

It's like someone coming to these message boards and claiming VB is much better than C for driver programming.

At the same time ruling out another extremely popular format called modules, which makes the whole discussion sort of "anti-digital, orchestra is the best".

I'm just pointing out that orchestral music is a minority, and staves should probably only be used in conjunction with it.

Arabic, chinese, and equal are all different temperaments compared to the western scale.
I can store text in a gif file, but it still won't describe the file properly.
midi data can include the pitch information for the temperament used, so therefore it is a valid container for the music.

This is what I mean.. ruling out things before even giving them a fair chance.
What do you need it for anyways?
Music for programs or production?
If it's for the latter then probably you might be better off with midi and a few thousand $ of synths =P

Otherwise mod is a great way of making professional sounding music (creatively) for free.

MOD (MODule) is the original format, supports only 4 channels and a limited samplelength of 256k 8bit samples.
XM (eXtended Module) supports 32 channels and has 16/8bit samples of up to 4Gb.
IT (Impulse Tracker) can have 64 channels, 16/8bit samples, and pan a bit easier than xm, and some other tiny additions that you can probably live without. (the effects are not standard and eat a lot of cpu, they were never in the original IT)

Bottom line, choose according to the tracker you like, not the file format, as long as it can export/import both xm and it, you should be alright in putting music in programs.

People are getting too lazy these days, check the binary spec for midi or mod format before claiming it cannot support something.
And before complaining about it here, why not make an addition that fixes the problem?

That's exactly what you did, and what started this.:

--

Yes, I've admitted that all along, but midi data in that sense is not comparable to notation, it's more like a recording. It serves a different purpose. What we were comparing was the notation. As you put it "I can store text in a gif file, but it still won't describe the file properly". A human can still read that text, and so it can serve it's purpose. After all, a book is nothing more than pictures of letters. Traditional notation is meant to be read by humans, not computers. If a computer is to perform the music it may need something else, but what I'm arguing is that for humans, the traditional notation works very well.

Of course, if you think that human musicians are a thing of the past, then you are correct that traditional notation also is a thing of the past(unless the notation is an aid to the composer), so I think I see where you are coming from now. But that is an idea I oppose even stronger. Not in this thread, though. One subject at the time, please.

--

None of those quotes were mine and I hope I haven't said anything that would qualify on that list either. The purpose of my participation has not been to flame anyone or force my opinions on anyone. (Unless it counts as an opinion that music notation still is useful.) I have also tried to understand why Funklord made that inital statement, since I find that interesting as a music teacher.

Is that why it lasts centuries while other music is in and out in a week? (Extremely exaggerated, biased and irrelevant statement, but I know that, so don't bother arguing )

I was gonna post here and say I'd be Irrelevant's friend - but he killed the thread, didn't he

I haven't read the above posts - not by a long shot - but I only have one thing to say: Live And Let Live. MIDI, MOD, traditional manuscript notation, piano roll views, "glorified hex editors", etc. all have their place - use what suits you, and don't flame others for using different systems.

Have something to back this up?

It shouldn't be, and I'll be damned if it'll ever cease to exist because of uninnovative cut'n'paste techno music.

Why? I'll just map 60Gb of samples. No need for synths.

ask [put your favourite big artist here]...

No of course it will not cease to exist, not even close to,
Techno has already though... or, not many people listen/write techno anymore.

Anything that makes you happy =)
The reason I use midi is to sorta get away from samples and access quality patches from synths.

Did you mean MIDI by the way? If so, I'm not arguing this one. If you meant modules, I'll just say "haw".

By the term "techno" I meant an umbrella term which gathers all these Britney Spearii and other one-song miracle bands under it. Check out MTV and you know what I mean.

You know little of the method I'm using then.

Inph:
I meant midi of course, modules have always been frowned upon, in music studios.

Probably because they are a low budget way of making sample-only music.
But for programs, there is no better option.

"techno" is as far away from britney spears as classical is from drum n bass.
It is what a lot of electronic music sounded like during the late 80's.
Britney music is more influenced by rock, than electronic music.

A better umbrella term may be "boy & girlband"
since it is widely understood to cover this type of music.

Probably, everyone works differently, midi is just a standard protocol that makes our music stuff all talk the same language to eachother.
But looking away from that, some people have a rack full of samplers, whilst others mainly have synths and 1 odd sampler.
now it is even possible to generate sound in realtime with the computer, although software mostly isn't of the same caliber.

There is one thing of Funklord's that I would like to reply to:

This wasn't idle speculation on a potential large project. This wasn't thowing out the possibility of a large-scale project. No, this was information about a real project for use by the real world that I am currently involved in. Not only is our game that huge, in terms of code size, it would be hard to imagine many PC or console games these days being too much smaller than that. Maybe half that size would be the lower bound I'd imagine.

Even at that, you've still got 1-2K on average file line size with 250 or so separate .cpp files. And, yes, we do all our compiling and so forth on Windows boxes. We have no need (and the majority of us would revolt if forced) to use UNIX or Linux machines.

As far as the various .mod formats is concerned: I like MODs. Well, I like the concept of MODs, anyway. The core design idea (I know that the original MOD format was not really designed, but bear with me) is that a MOD should sound the same on whatever system it is played on. I just don't get that with MIDI's.

For that reason, I would go with a MOD format. One of the problems with using MOD formats, however, is the trackers themselves. And I'm not talking about the interface; I'm refering to their age.

I can't use Impulse Tracker on my WinXP box. It's a DOS program, and XP just doesn't like them. Also, my sound card (an Audigy) doesn't seem to come with DOS drivers. Win2000 will probably exhibit the same problems. FastTracker 2 will, almost certainly, exhibit these problems. Impulse Tracker is the only program that creates .it files, which is one of the better MOD formats. The FastTracker2 format, .xm (right?), is only exported by FastTracker2.

It's really annoying that the two most popular and advanced MOD formats can't actually be created on modern Windows OS's.

There are a few Windows MOD editors out there. Mad Tracker 2, for example, can load .it and .xm files. Unfortunately, it cannot save them; instead, it uses it's own propriatery format, .mt2. Granted, they say on their page that they can save to .xm, but I haven't found a way to make it do so. I don't know of a stand-alone (or WinAMP plugin) player for .mt2 files, thus making them somewhat useless. Unless, of course, Bruce is going to add .mt2 support into DUMB.

There do exist trackers for Windows that save both xm and it (see beginning of thread), but you can get sound in DOS programs under NT Windowses if you use VDMSound. (I've been told a Win 9x version in in the works too.) I've found it to work great with old DOS games (using Audigy and XP), so it should work with your favourite tracker too.

Ahm... while it's not a tracker... have a look at:
[url http://www.steinke.net/download/beatbox.zip]
it's the WIP of a small (and fun) utility I'm working on

SC... no extension... don't know how to open it hehe.

Yes I am aware of big companies going this path.
Why else is microsoft making so much money?
Their own statistics prove that their main income is not from OS sales, it's from contracted tech support for companies.

Your company is free to do whatever they please, if they are developing MS games then I guess there is no other option.

But for me the idea of 10-20% of desktops constantly being "repaired" or waiting for troubleshooters, is not an option, nor is server downtime.
The tech support bills and 1 employee per 10 machine ratio required when operating MS products are simply not feasible.

Oups.
It's [url http://www.steinke.net/download/beatbox.zip]

nice proggie spellcaster!
but... the random function makes better sound than me!

I mentioned it already, but here it is again since some of you have missed it... MODPLUG TRACKER is a great Windows tracker, and it loads/saves all of the main formats. Don't use the old DOS stuff unless you have to.

Spellcaster: I think I already congratulated you on the nice drum machine proggie

I made a drum&bass ringtone for my cellular with it =)

@Spellcaster: check this out!

miran: no idea what this is
If I click play, all I get is random noise? And it's almost not audible, even if I turn my speakers to max...

Eskimoo, Funklord: Thanks
The funny thing is that it took my really long to get the export function to work
I coded the main proggy in a couple of hours, then added the gui... but the export (and related stuff, like alogg and dumb, and me being to stupid to mix) took 4-5 times as long

Hm... I'll add loading / saving, wav exporting and some other stuff in the next release.

Maybe even some new drum sets
(Which would then force me add drum set selection)

Does anybody know some nice (and free) percussion samples?

For anyone that really doesn't get it: it's a program that creates and playes random music.

Ok... how do I use it?
There was no readme, and I tried clicking buttons and stuff.. but with no real result.
And the button labels didn't tell me much (I've no bg in music, maybe that's the problem)

You click play and it should work. It should create some more or less random bass/synth line riffs and a drum track and play it in realtime. Click some buttons, pull some sliders, etc. to change settings.

BTW, the author of the program is arguru, who is a rather famous programer in the field of electronic music (he made a ton of trackers, synths, midi trackers, plugins, etc.). If i'm not mistaken the only reason he wrote this program was to prove someone that you actually do not need a functional brain to write techno and similar music.

I CANNOT BELIEVE I JUST HEARD THAT

ModPlug Tracker attempts to support all the popular formats, but it gets a few things wrong. Ever tried creating an IT file and putting portamento and arpeggio together? (You can put portamento in the volume column.) It creates a cool effect in IT; ModPlug doesn't have a clue about this, or it didn't last time I tried. (DUMB gets it right ) ModPlug also plays things at a much lower level than IT (usually), meaning people write music that sounds fine in ModPlug but then distorts badly in IT. Grr.

As for the interface: yes, ModPlug Tracker is more approachable, but many people prefer IT's interface. I use both, depending on how I feel; but I always remember that IT is the authority on playback.

Also, I recommend you don't use ModPlug's extra effect plug-in thingies, unless you intend to export to OGG or something. ModPlug's effect plug-ins are very Windows-specific ("DirectX Media Audio Effects"); good luck getting any of them to work on Linux (without using Wine or similar). So don't use that as a reason why ModPlug Tracker might be better than Impulse Tracker In my opinion, ModPlug Tracker should be using its own file format for this stuff.

And don't get me started on the quality of ModPlug Tracker's filters compared with IT's.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying ModPlug doesn't have its uses. It's actually very useful, for those of us who for whatever reason can't get the DOS stuff to work. I just think people should be aware of its flaws. No offence, but disregarding the "old DOS stuff" is just uninformed

IT is available here by the way.

Hmm.. If i recall correctly, There was something shoddy with MPT's handling of offsets, too. I'll look into it when i get home to see if i was right or wrong.

Also ModPlug gets sample vibrato completely wrong. Something I noticed just recently...

BTW, Impulse Tracker is one of the reasons I still primarily boot into Win98...

EDIT:
@jhuuskonen: You're probably thinking of this. They are two S3Ms written by Firelight (author of FMOD) with the sole purpose of phucking up as many players and trackers as possible. MPT or MPP doesn't play them at all!

Allright. I performed the experiment (i.e. played a certain song) in mpt and it passed the offset error test.

[edit] and the file is ZG_6DN7N.XM. Couldn't find ot on modarchive though. I'd put it somewhere but I don't have webspace on anything else than my workstation and I DON'T want my comp getting slashdotted.

WinAmp on the other hand failed miserably

Hmm..
[edit]
Contrary to my beliefs and tests conducted earlier, Modplug didn't fail this one either. Order 25 in that is iiwul. It goes backwards too, by a combination of pattern break and order jump commands, thus staying inside the same pattern. Really cool, and iiwul.

I remember this came with Mod4Win.. With the old formats (i.e. Older than XM) it did a good job.

That's pattern 25, order 29...
And what does iiwul mean???

that is classified level Mahogny/#allegro