Soundmon editor for Windows v0.3d by Timecircle
Hello world, <General> This is "Brian's Soundmon" for windows. Currently it's still under development, but I decided to make it available anyway. If you try this program and detect any bugs please let me know so I can fix 'em in the final release. <Why?> Why did I create this?.... Well mainly because I still have got a large collection of old tunes and I don't want them to go to waste (but also coz its fun to code something....anything at all). why the stupid interface?.... Well the original amiga version was only used by a couple of people for creating game and demo tunes. The thing with game tunes in those days was that they should be compact and the replayer had to be fast. To accomplish that the sound structure is very flat and is optimized for speed and memory consumption. Since the editor was only used by a couple of guys there was no need for a fancy interface (I had, and still have, other things to do as well). The interface of this windows program is adopted from the amiga version and has the same look and feel (a few different colours but that's it). Why only 4 channels?.... Because it's an amiga format player, the amiga only had 4 hardware channels (only?? most PC's still only got 2, but they use software mixing, where the amiga used hardware mixing. The Amiga hardware still rocks, where the PC hardware still sucks). Why should I use it?.... Don't, just fire it up and look at the beautiful colors. There is no reason why anybody should want to write songs in a sound format from 1989. <Tech info> As some people know there was a soundmon version for dos that was created around 1994. Since I've got a job nowadays I don't have the time anymore to sit behind my computer and code all night, therefore, to save time, I re-used some of the 'C' code that I wrote 6 years ago. All in all, it still took me some 40 hours to put all this together and get it to work. I tried to get the editor part platform indepedent and used a 'WinGfx' layer that will translate all on- screen action to windows API calls. Since the soundplayer itself is also based on a independent part and a platform dependent 'LSoundPlayer' class (a linux 'LSoundPlayer' has already been created and is available) it should be possible to convert the editor to linux (or other platforms) by just re- writing the 'WinGfx' layer. Currently the source code is a mix of old 'C' source code and some newly written 'C++' source code. Not a very nice package, but it works and does the trick. As soon as I'm finished debugging all this (and fixed the bugs) I'll make the source code available. <Additional> When playing or entering notes from the keyboard there is some latency because the playbuffer is always filled as far from the playcursor as possible. This way I can make sure it still works on slow computers (not too slow). The effect is that it can take some time before the playing actually starts. Currently the buffer is set to 32768 bytes. Since there are 2*44010/50 = 1760 bytes written every update (every 20ms) it can take up to 400ms before the sound actually starts (almost half a second). I'll probably add an option in the preferences to allow changing the buffer size, currently the size is fixed (smaller buffers give problems on slower computers). <Documentation> Not yet available. Get the amiga version from my website (and maybe the DOS version as well) and read the documentation supplied with those. Have fun with it.... And should you make any nice songs, let me know.... Brian ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ E-Mail: B.Postma@hetnet.nl http://www.homepages.hetnet.nl/~brianpostma ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Change history: 0.2d : Added copy & paste pattern. 0.3d : Added (improved) Showwave option to editor (in 'Help' menu).
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