Thanks for your quick repy. All the music is in a single MO3 tracker song, and the layers are just note data on specific channels (channels 0-8 reserved for layer 1, 9-16 for layer 2, etc). They're used both additively and exclusively (more than 1 set of channels may be playing simultaneously, and channels 9-16 may get faded in while 0-8 keep playing).

As for the rest of the details, I'll have to ask the programmers working on this, but I'll point them to this forum thread. Either I'll get back to you, or they will.

I'm working on the music for a game that's using BASS.DLL and the MO3 tracker music format on iOS.

The plan was to use a few layers in the music by putting them on different tracker song channels, then fading those channels in and out according to the situation. However, they ran into an odd issue: whenever channel volumes are adjusted and faded in and out, there is a massive hit on the CPU demands.

I'm not the programmer on this project, nor I have an actual iOS device I could check it on, but I was just wondering, if you had an idea what could be causing this?

Thanks!

In my enthusiasm I forgot to ask: is there a way to preview and compare how these effects work in iOS if I don't have an iOS device?

If I listen to the tracker song in Windows with XMPlay, it uses the Windows DirectX DSP, not the BASS DSP, right? Is there a way to switch XMPlay to use BASS's own versions of these effects instead?

Awesome!    Thanks.

The DirectX DSP are really handy for improving the sound quality of tracker music while still keeping the file size very small (especially with MO3). But they work in Windows only in BASS.

Would it be feasible to emulate at least some of them on the other platforms? At least Echo (a very simple low-overhead delay effect) would be very handy in this regard. It would improve the sound while not using much CPU, so it would be feasible even on BASS iOS. Which, by coincidence, is the platform my next music project, with tracker music, is targeted to.

FMOD nowadays modulates DirectX's Echo, Flange and Chorus on all platforms. However, that aforementioned project is meant to use huge samples while keeping the download size small, so MO3 (and thus BASS) is the only option. There's OggMod, but I want to use the .IT format and its NNAs.

It would be awesome if this worked on .IT files too, because XMs don't have NNAs, nor support the DirectX DSPs...

Thank you for your reply.

I would be very careful with DX effects

We've already tried to run the game's music via FMOD which emulates the DX effects on iOS, and the CPU usage isn't unreasonable. Only one Chorus, one Echo and one Flanger are used. Using Echo actually saves channels, because the other method would be to fake the echo by playing extra channels as echoes.

However, we'd like to try tracker song channel fading for interactivity (layers), which FMOD doesn't support, and the tiny .mo3 file support is also a great plus. So BASS could be a better option.

Just wondering, though: FMOD emulates the DX effects, but iOS itself doesn't actually have DirectX. So to support those effects, BASS would also have to emulate them on non-Windows platforms. The question is: does it?

Long time no see.  I'm starting work on an iOS game's music, and the game has a very strict download size limit, so tracker music would be the ideal choice. Glad to see BASS.DLL has also become available for iOS.

I have a few questions:
- Does BASS iOS support tracker music?
- If it does, does it also support the (emulated) DirectX effects that OpenMPT supports? (chorus, echo, flanger, what not)
- Is the .mo3 format also supported, for even smaller download size?

Thanks!

It would be cool if people visiting my website could play my music straight off the page without having to download it. The problem is, part of them are in IT / S3M format. One solution could be to just disk-write MP3s of all my songs, but I just thought I'd ask if it was plausible at all to make a web version of BASS?

Oh, never mind, I just found this old post (by yours truly) in the ModPlug Tracker forums:

http://www.modplug.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2215

 

[MO3 2.1]

I noticed in the mailing list update that MO3 2.1 supports high-pass filters. But what tracker does? At least I haven't been able to find a high-pass filter on ModPlug Tracker. Are there some other MOD/IT/XM/S3M compliant trackers that do?

Well, here's hoping you'll get your devkit.

If you ever do, I have a wild(ish) idea, which probably has to be considered:

Lately I've run into one problem using tracker music in downloadable console games: memory usage. Even though MO3 format makes the download size of the music tiny, its memory footprint remains large - as large as the unpacked size of all the samples used.

Now here's an idea: What if, after downloading, the songs would be disk-written and encoded into .WMA format into the console's hard drive for streaming? It would then combine the best of the both worlds: tiny download size and a small memory footprint.

The only problem I see in this (beside hard drive usage) is looping: decaying notes at the end of the song will not loop properly if the song gets disk-written. Especially if the song doesn't loop to the beginning of the song, but to the middle.

A bit dumb question, but the MO3 format was not mentioned in the XM-EXE blurb, so I have to ask: Does XM-EXE allow you to make executables out of MO3s as well?

You can use bass.dll in xbox, you have to link to the .lib and import it into the project. you cannot just reference a dll. At least, that's what I believe...

Really, would it work that way?

And Ian, heard anything from Microsoft yet re: Xbox development?

Just speculating: for the Xbox, I suppose WMA encoded samples would work better, since the codec is supported directly? Would this mean that the MO3 Encoder would need to be enhanced with WMA encoding?

Check out this discussion at fmod.org:
http://www.fmod.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1003

They call trackers a "minority" and don't consider accurate tracker playback very important. BASS could have some serious competitive edge here with its more accurate, higher quality playback... also on Xbox.

So FMod's advantage would be wide support, and BASS's advantage would be high quality playback.

Heya Ralesk. OK, now I recognized you..  :idea: I didn't remember your nickname, I only remembered your full name. How's it going?

You didn't expect me here? Well, if I deal with tracker music for shareware games, and BASS.DLL is a powerful tool for such purposes, why would I not stumble here sooner or later?  

Oh I see! Probably filters, since I use those in a couple of instruments (don't use surround, though).

Thanks for the reply, I an, and, um, thanks for the gushing, Olego.  

Update: I listened to the MO3 file with XMPlay, and it sounds fine there. Apparently the crackling can only be heard in the MO3 encoder.

Regardless, anyone else encountered this?

Just decided to give MO3 a go... a shareware game I'm going to make music for is going to use MO3 format for its music. I tested the MO3 encoder with one of my songs, which had loads of 44100Hz stereo samples and was 8 Mb in size. The file size dropped down to 998kb. Impressive!  

However, there is one problem: whenever I listen to the original song, or the encoded song, within the MO3 encoder, I hear really nasty crackling.  :-/

It kind of sounded like clipping, so I thought it was due to too high global volume, but reducing the song's volume didn't help at all. In ModPlug Tracker the music sounds fine.

Has anyone else encountered this?