Monster Media 1993 #2/Image.iso/sound2/trakos2.zip/TRACKER.DOC

Text File | 1991-12-11 | 5KB | 101 lines

tracker is a soundtracker player for sparc or silicon graphics
machines.
To build it, just use the appropriate makefile.


tracker is a public domain program, it is not guaranteed to do anything
at all, either useful or useless. Do with it as you will, but
use it at your own risk.

``Soundtracker'' is a family of music composition programs
that exists on the amiga. The resulting data files (modules)
have been appearing on ftp sites for some time now.

For a machine with sufficient horsepower and some audio capability,
it is possible to emulate the amiga audio hardware in real time,
and play those modules.
After that, you're only limited by the machine's capabilities. The
sparc is a bit poor (as a 8K machine), in contrast with the indigo,
which gives an almost perfect rendition of most modules.

This release of tracker supports most amiga soundtracker file formats,
and plays most of the existing effects, so that about 95% of the modules
are output correctly.

There is no man page (write it yourself), but a short description of
the options can be obtained with tracker -h.

Here is some supplementary information.

Environment variables:
OVERSAMPLE can be used to control the acurateness of the reproduction.
(It is the number of samples used to output one audio word).
The higher, the better, but the more CPU it will use. The default
value (1) is quite good at high frequencies, but not so for, for instance
a poor sparc station's 8000 Hz. You can try, say, 2 or 3. After that,
there won't be any noticeable improvement, and anyway, the program won't
be fast enough to keep up with the output rate.

FREQUENCY can be used to set the audio output at a specific frequency
(if the hardware supports it). The hardware will decide which frequency
to actually use, according to other external parameters.

MONO on the sgi can be used to force mono output, which uses less
cpu power.

TRANSPOSE is the number of halftones to transpose each note (>0 is higher).
Useful for low frequency sparcs which can't play some tunes accurately, or
when you get bored...

Most of the switches are here for compatibility reasons. As there
are billions and billions.. wait, wrong series. As there are lots and
lots of soundtrackers clones out there, they are not *quite*
compatible with one another. Mainly, there was an old format and a
newer format.
You can force one of these formats by either renaming your command
to ntracker or otracker, or you can use the -n and -o switch to try
reading a file as a new tracker file, or an old tracker file.
The default is to try first the new tracker format, then revert to
the old tracker format (switch -b for both).
There is also a speed problems. Most trackers use some timing which
is dependent upon the powerline frequency... 60Hz in the states, 50Hz
in Europe. Most modules have been composed in Europe, so the default
is 50Hz, but you can set that speed to 60Hz with -s60.
(Incidentally, you can try and speed up a module to amazing speeds like
-s200, just for fun).

The -f switch is not really there to be used, except if there is a
module you really can't play, then try -f2.

The -r switch is obvious (I hope).

The -m value is a mix value. In real-world stereo, you hear each side on
the other side, at least a bit. With headphones, this effect disappears,
unless you mix a bit of each side on the other side.
0 is spatial stereo (not for headphones), 100 is mono.
A reasonable value is 30. The perceived change tends to be logarithmic,
interesting values would be 30, 70, 85, 90, 92, 95...

Finally, the program itself is reasonably smart, you can use it as a
module jukebox by giving a tracker *  -like command line, then skip from
one module to the next by sending a signal 2 (usually ^C) and aborting
altogether with a signal 2 (usually ^\). It recognizes also modules
packed with either compress or zoo... Adding your own compression method
should be easy. It is also fairly difficult to crash, because tracker
modules are notorious problem files, with lots of formats problems.


The original idea of the tracker was by Liam Corner, back when it
was called str32, but there is precious little left of his original
code (if any of it). I must admit, I would never have had the idea
(nor the courage) to start that project all by myself.

You can do what you want with the source code, though I would suggest
that Liam and myself be cited if you add anything to it.

Send bug reports to [e-mail],
encouragements and nice things to [e-mail] and [e-mail].
--

    Marc Espie, Paris, december 11th 1991.