Topic: How to create subsongs into MO3?

[Amrud]

Hi all...i am very very new to MO3 format and trackers in general. I got a question which would probably sound silly, but here goes...

i've created 3 songs and converted them into XM format, and i need to compress them into one single MO3 format. Now, i know how to compress 1 song into 1 MO3, but how do i group them into a single MO3 and embed some sort of flags that mark the start and end of each song? These songs share the same set of soundbanks. FYI, this is for use in a computer game project that i'm working on now.

i've got MID2XM, MODPlug, MO3 encoder and XMPlay in my machine. So please help me with this, i need to know quite urgently as the project is due very very soon! and i've only been introduced to this format 3 days ago...

any help would be much appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Cheers.

[raina]

Subsongs in modules are based on the usage of pattern jump commands. It's really just one song and what's played depends on where in the module you start playing.

What XMPlay does is it analyzes the module and when a jump command that always returns the module to a certain point is found, the actual jump command is ignored and that spot is marked as the end of one subsong. So what I'm saying here is that the module has to be divided into subsongs while writing it for everything to go smooth. Grouping several modules into subsongs in one module is hard manual work, as I explained in this thread. It's possible, yes.. but it gets harder and harder the longer every song is. If you in fact have every module using the exact same samples in the exact same sample slots, that'll save you SOME work, though.

If this (and the other thread) seem like hebrew to you and you're in a hurry, you could always send me the modules so I could have a look at them. I'm raina (at) daug dot net.

[Amrud]

Helo raina, thank you for the quick response!

Yes I found the Jump effect in MODPlug and now I can place markers in my songs finally! Thank you so much for the tip..

However, one more thing, there's an audible pop or click whenever the song reach the marker when I played it in XMPlay..Is this due to the samples resolution, or perhaps the song's compression rate? Is there any ways that I could smoothen the transition between songs?

Thanks again

[raina]

The jump command shouldn't alter the sound in any way. Compression shouldn't affect either because everything is uncompressed before playing. So if the compressed samples sound ok otherwise, this isn't the problem. Currently listening to Skaven's Hamsterball Gold soundtrack, which is a MO3 with 20 subsongs. No pops or clicks between subsongs. The first thing that comes to mind is that your samples from the first subsongs are being violently cut by the starting second subsong. The second is that you have experimented with the pattern jump command several times and when you deleted some extra jump commands, you only deleted the effect command but not the parameters which results in an unwanted arpeggio effect. But that's an FT2 thing, it seems that (Open) Modplug won't let you have paramenters without effect numbers in the patterns.

[Allan Simonsen]

If your audio-designer has finished creating a clip like that (10 sub-sections in a single MO3), how would I go about enummerating them? Is there a quick way I can scan through the song, find the 10 start points (or 10 jump points) before I start playing.

This is mainly because different subsets have different functions (intro, loop, bridge, warning, etc)

Allan

[raina]

Well scanning the whole pattern data or the last row of each pattern for the jump commands shouldn't take too long I think. Another way would be writing fixed starting points of every subsong into the code.

[Allan Simonsen]

I suspect I'll probably end up encoding the points in a text-file, and read that in together with the music file. It's more that I'm wondering how to easily iterate through it, and finding exact positions, since it seems to be jumping randomly around.

Allan

[raina]

I'm sorry, what's jumping around randomly? It should be fairly simple. Here's what it looks like in the pattern order view:

Code: [Select]

00 00                                                    <-- HERE -.
01 00                                                              |
02 01                                                              |
03 02 <-- A pattern jump command (B00) here causes a jump back to -'
04 07                                                    <-- HERE -.
05 0a                                                              |
06 07                                                              |
07 08 <-- A pattern jump command (B04) here causes a jump back to -'
Now there's two subsongs. The starting point of the first one is always order 00 and the next one is the order number after the first jump command.