Since owning one of the original Mac II's, way back when, I have yearned for music software that would take advantage of the stereo capabilities of the hardware. That wait has been almost 5 years long but it now looks like one really can do it.
SoundTracker is the 2nd public domain Mac program in recent months that demonstrates the true capabilities of the the system 7.0 sound manager. Remember how when 6.0.7 came out, lots of extensions showed up that allowed for asynchronous sound to be played??? Even while some other fairly intensive things were occuring??? Well, that raised the point for me of why can't the music software for the Mac take advantage of this feature and let us finally have background music while we are plunking away in a foreground application.
It seems that the commercial companies have yet to get this working and out the door. And lots of good Mac music like the SuperStudio Session tunes waste away unless one allows that be the foreground application.
Several months ago Jim Nitchals brought out his MidiCD v1.02ß software that demonstrated his homegrown technology of being able to read any standard MIDI file and play it as background music on the Mac. Even produced stereo if one desired!!! His technology is available for liscencing into other products. Just think of what one could do with a SuperStudio Session type of program that reads standard MIDI tracks for the tunes and plays them in the background to user designated instruments!!
Recently Frank Seide and Olaf Höhmann released SoundTracker 0.9. This program allows the Mac to play .MOD soundtracks that have been created on Atari ST, Amiga, or yes, even DOS platforms. After hearing a couple of tunes you'll find that this sounds similiar to what one ends up with if one were to record a SuperStudioSession song to disk. Of course the .MOD sound files take up MUCH less disk space. Once again we have another public domain software program that demonstrates the capability of being able to play background music on a '020 or higher class Mac.
What I have done is collected most of the .MOD tunes from 3 INTERNET file archive sites, unarchived them (boy is that .lzh algorithm slow), and converted them to SoundTracker data files. I have played all of them and removed those that bomb on my Mac IIfx. Note: some of the instrument tracks in some of the songs may still occasionally sound like white noise. I think that is because SoundTracker is not yet a finished program. Some of these songs play just fine on an IRIS Indigo.
And finally, that brings up the last in this essay. I have submitted to Nautilus some Public Domain source code that allows a SGI or SUN to play .MOD files. This source code was also obtained off of the INTERNET, specifically the SGI discussion group. So if you want to create a SoundTracker tune editor you now have a starting point.
Enjoy the tunes and pressure your favorite Mac music software company to get background, stereo music capabilities into their products.
[[ Who am I? I'm an advanced Mac computer user from the Mac128K days who keeps up-to-date on what new in the public domain arena. I also stay very poor trying to buy every other new Mac 'generation' to keep my hardware somewhat current. :-) ]]
