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Tools requests (for Maxim?)
Post Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2001 4:37 pm
Those are a few things I'd like to have. This is partly intended to Maxim since he's well involved in writing VGM related tools, but I might write some myself.

- A tool to list VGM commands (easy to do).

- A tool to detect data pattern and suggest or even automatically trim them. This is very possible, and would save people quite some time. This of course only works if there are no sound effects playing with the music (there, an heuristic detector would work better.).

- A tool to strip FM and/or PSG from a VGM.

- Helper tools to uncompress VGM from VGZ (probably there's something already on the net available, since it's generic Gzip tool.)

- The drag'n drop compress tool is buggy for some reason I don't understand well, and seems to output data to the same file for different input files. I'm not sure (gotta investigate) but I think this has something to do with short and long file names.

- A Windows player supporting YM2413 :-)

Suggestions ?
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Stefan Lindberg
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Post Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2001 5:10 pm
A tool like YMagic32 but for VGM files would be nice, just so you don't have to make wave files and stuff.

YMagic32 at http://oedipus.atari.org (in the software section)



 
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Re: Tools requests (for me?)
Post Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2001 6:41 pm
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> Those are a few things I'd like to have. This is partly intended to Maxim since he's well involved in writing VGM related tools, but I might write some myself.

[insert usual "I'm not able to use my own computer so I can't do much/any of this stuff right now" disclaimer here]

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> - A tool to list VGM commands (easy to do).

Yeah. Actually, that's the first VGM (DGM actually) thing I wrote, to check that I was reading the VGM data properly (and also to figure out problems with some of the early test files Dave made). Downside: huge output files.

Quote
> - A tool to detect data pattern and suggest or even automatically trim them. This is very possible, and would save people quite some time. This of course only works if there are no sound effects playing with the music (there, an heuristic detector would work better.).

Yes, possible but difficult. It's non-trivial to find repeated sections in a stream of data quickly (by non-trivial I mean it'd take over a pageful of code, and quite a lot of mental effort).

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> - A tool to strip FM and/or PSG from a VGM.

I'm planning to add this to VGMTool - since it's much better to strip it out, because then you don't need to waste CPU cycles emulating a silent chip. I think some of the existing (PSG) VGMs set the FM clock to non-zero, causing this effect in the new plugin I'm making.

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> - Helper tools to uncompress VGM from VGZ (probably there's something already on the net available, since it's generic Gzip tool.)

Yeah. I just rename to .vgm.gz and right-click for Winamp to uncompress; I'll probably write a dedicated program for that, like the GZipper... for now, you could make a batch file pointing to gzip.exe (from gzip.org) with appropriate parameters.

Quote
> - The drag'n drop compress tool is buggy for some reason I don't understand well, and seems to output data to the same file for different input files. I'm not sure (gotta investigate) but I think this has something to do with short and long file names.

Yeah. On my home computer, you can drag-and-drop a load of files onto it, and it works brilliantly - a separate instance is run for each file, useful because I didn't have to bother to code a parameter parser, and it uses LFNs all the way through. On this computer, it runs one instance with all the files passed as SFNs, so the VGZ has a xxx~1 type name :( I just need to stick in some code from other programs to convert SFN->LFN and get all the parameters (although Windows can only pass a limited number of characters, so dragging a load of files can't work without getting into DDE). Also, the Zlib code has a stupidly limited path buffer (I increased it from ~70 chars to 255, which is more than MAX_PATH) which tends to get overflowed if you have a long path to the files.

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> - A Windows player supporting YM2413 :-)

I'm making one now! (WA plugin again.) It's progressing steadily, anyone who wants can have a beta.

Maxim
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YMagic
Post Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2001 7:15 pm
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> A tool like YMagic32 but for VGM files would be nice, just so you don't have to make wave files and stuff.

> YMagic32 at http://oedipus.atari.org (in the software section)

I Googled for a more descriptive site, and saw what it is... basically it's like a VGM command lister, with the ability to change the start, loop and end points. However, I personally think it'd be much harder to edit files that way - it can be difficult to see the edit points visually in a wave editor, sometimes you have to do it mostly by ear, and to do it just by seeing the note values numerically would be much harder, especially because VGM files contain a great deal more data than what seemed to be in the YM file shown in the screenshot I saw.

Maxim
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Martin Skog
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An octave selector!
Post Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2001 8:00 pm
I have a suggestion! An "octave selector", so you can play the music a bit higher or lower than usual. Lot of songs are too high and "beepy", I think, so it hurts in my head. It would be cool if I could transpose the music up or down.
 
Martin Skog
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I want a beta!
Post Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2001 8:04 pm
Send it to moontrip77@hotmail.com !
 
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see s8-dev forum *nt*
Post Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2001 11:01 pm
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> Send it to moontrip77@hotmail.com !
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