Sound engine demo

[Rhino123]

Overloaded Music Player Tech Demo

download link:


Features:
- up to 16 soundchannels
- various soundmixers among which interpolated ones
- Sampled sounds and/or realtime synthesis instruments
- Sampled sounds can loop bidirectional
- Easy reuse of sampled sounds for small filesizes.
- Synthesised sounds can have upto 4 effect layers among which morphs/filters etc etc
- Multiple (sub) songs into 1 big song which all share the same instrument/sample bank.
- Small memory footprint due to synthetic sounds and sample reuse. (especially zipped)

Demosongs:
- Popcorn
The famous little synth song. Made entirely with synthetic instruments. Zipped only 3 kb.
Shows that songs can be really small using synthetic sounds but still sound good.

- Waterballet
A small tune also made entirely of synthetic sounds. zipped only 8kb
Shows that player can emulate typical FM synthesis (yamaha DX7) type sounds.

- Kingtut
A somewhat more substantial song. Zipped 96kb. Has sampled sounds (drums) and
synthesized sounds (the rest).

- Subsongs
One of the largest songs. Has tons of lo-fi samples and some crisp synthetic sounds.
Shows the capability to have more than 1 subsong in the main song to save memspace.

- Pacman
Just a silly version of the pacman theme showing off that we really can't make any music. ;^)


notes:

- Some synthetic sounds are more costly than others. For instance, realtime filters are more processorpower intensive than say a simple pulsewidth modulation. Bearing this in mind, the composer can make his/her songs just so that it remains in the processor power usage the programmer had reserved for the music.
- We are starting soon to rewrite various partds of the sound engine to ARM assembly. This should give an expected increase of 200 - 300 % in performance.
- A quick way to boost performance now is to go to the settings menu and select a lower fequency output or even toggling mono mode rendering.

Comments welcome!


Reinier

[laurnet]

[pib]

[Lewil]

[Rhino123]

Hi!

Thanks for the positive feedback!


As for the questions: No it doesn't use Mikmod. It renders/mixes into the windows wavebuffers directly. The soundengine supports external triggered playback of samples/synthetix sounds. these soudns can be controlled in regards to pitch/pan/volume etc etc.

Thus having an engine sound played through the background music which is pitch controlled by software is no problem.


We posted this demo to see if you guys would have any problems working with a music library like this instead of typical XM mod players. The mod players in our eyes lack the support of synthetic sounds, something which might tbe crucial to ensure that gamemusic is small and not huge.

The only drawback is of course the compatibility issue. Everyone in the world is usedto XMmods... this library is similar but does have a learning curve for the musician. Then again, the musician has much more flexibility to control his sounds.

last advantage: if something should be changed, we can change it since we have made it... in mikmod it is more difficult to change something since no one knows how it works and why it works ;^)

Any thoughts?

R

[Lewil]

[pib]

[Rhino123]

[Lewil]

ok :) so can we have a look to the editor so we can try to make some piece of music ?

in fact, it's interesting to know that the restitution is good but it's also important to evaluate our own ability to compose for it, isn't it ?

[Rhino123]

The original editor is available for free for the PC at: http://www.klaar.com


A stripped down editor for the PocketPC exists also but I wouldn't recommend composing big tunes with it..it is mainly intended to doodle some music when you are on the road.


Note that with the big version a HTML document is supplied with a small explanation of how it all works! Of course tons of sounds and demosongs are supplied along with the program for you to fiddle around with.

Rhino

[Phantom]

www.klaar.com? BROEHA!

[britcode]

I'm fascinated by this, especially not using purely samples for the instruments, I'm also interested in software synths.

I'm curious what algorithms you are using for the sounds? Is it like a square wave, triangle wave, saw-tooth, and then you shape the sound with filters like IIR filters and boost it? And reverb and echo and stuff?

Or it is layers of saw-tooth waves or something?
Do you do any FM synthesis?
What about the drums, are they samples or synthed?

[Rhino123]

[Conan]

[Rhino123]