things you can do, as a studious musician, with module music formats (mod, xm, it...):
- open em in trackers and study how they work without having to transcribe them manually
- reuse their instruments in your own work
- when writing demos/games, allow the executable and music to interact precisely (e.g. visualizations, dynamic bgm)
- easy seamless looping
things you can do with rendered audio (mp3, wav, ogg...):
-
- chop them up for samples?
- transcribe if you're some kind of cool kid i guess
@sc i'm inclined to agree, with the qualification that xm doesn't have nearly as many security holes
@theoutrider depends on the quality of the included samples and the configuration of the player!
@theoutrider also, if you roll your own player and have the spare computrons in your game loop to include a softsynth (basically any Genesis emulator should demonstrate the feasibility of this approach), you could do that too and unchain the quality of the music from the quality of your samples. but that'd be pretty extra for most applications
@theoutrider yep!! you can sorta use midi for similar functionality, but it's gonna sound garbage unless you include your own softsynth or some samples for the notes to play, and tbh at that point you may as well just use a tracker format
@theoutrider @typhlosion is that the one they used that made the music dynamic in Tie Fighter? I remember there was a lot of hubbub about the digital rereleases, and not going for the CD-ROM version, because when it was released on CD they just cut all that stuff and used Star_Wars_Music.wav regardless of what was going on ingame.
@pastelbat @theoutrider yep, TIE Fighter used iMuse! at least according to wikipedia
@typhlosion @theoutrider Ah! Thankyou Kas.
I honestly didn't know these formats had modern equivalents that were easily accessible, and I wanna do more sound & music stuff for gamedev projects, so this is super helpful to learn about, it opens up so much potential for cool stuff being practically achievable for me. ✨
@pastelbat @theoutrider the main problem with tracker formats in the year of our lort 2019 is that tracker interfaces still look like this
@pastelbat @theoutrider here's renoise, a proper modern DAW (with VST support and everything) which is also a tracker, for good measure
@theoutrider @pastelbat the other famous example i really like is literally the entire soundtrack to Banjo Kazooie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-IZaebZ43Y
@theoutrider @typhlosion Ahh these are so good thankyou
Also yes, I have tried Renoise after a friend who was raised on trackers recommended it and uh
I spent enough time poking the interface trying to learn it, going through the example-pieces and just..
"What is it? Why is it arranged in these strange patterns? ..Could it be alive, Mr. Spock?"
..That I have a strong aversion to tracker interfaces, yeah. x_x
@theoutrider @typhlosion Also thinking about this kinda stuff, Crypt of the Necrodancer does this stuff really well, especially in Zone 3 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5jKseU-5Hs )
Nier Automata seamlessly swapping to 8-bit whenever you go into 9S' hacking minigame was simple but super-effective in a similar way to The Messenger, in that you feel transported, but still 'adjacent' to the main game.
(The game uses absence of this music later on to make really disquieting hacking sequences feel distinct, too)
@typhlosion xm is to swf as mp3 is to mp4