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Re: Sounds (various ideas - long)




Sorry for replying to this old message.  I'm just now getting to my huge 
mail box. :>

On Wed, 13 Dec 1995 Raphael.Quinet@eed.ericsson.se wrote:

> I think it's better to put all replies to the messages about sounds in a
> single thread, so here we go...

> > Yes, I have played Hexen.  Its a pretty cool game and I love the idea of 
> > atmosphere type sounds.  What would be nice though is to also have some 
> > music perhaps?  .MIDs are great but I have never seen a midi player for 
> > unix, so I don't know.  [...]
> 
> The easiest way to have background music would be to play a (long) .au
> file at a low level and mix it with other sound effects, because MIDI is
> not available on all systems.  But the music files would of course take
> a few Mb...

Huge .au files is not good at all.  In my opinion, the reason must 
systems don't have MIDI support is because people aren't supporting it.
If people would forge ahead and make whatever needs to be made, without 
worrying about how many systems support it, it would speed up the 
encouragement to get everyone to upgrade.  What happens when all the new 
stuff comming out works fine on your old computer?  No need to upgrade, 
technology stands still.  Kinda drastic, but I feel strong about that 
matter. :>
If you still want to make the whole game .au, perhaps we could do 
something I've seen done before with .wav files.  The result would 
actully be better since *most people* don't have wavetable for midi. :>
I don't know how flexable .au is compared to .wav, but what was done was 
a small .wav was recorded for each instrument, a instruction file (In 
this case, midi was used, but any form of instruction for music would 
work) was used to determine what kind of instrument was played at what 
note, pitch, volume, whatever.  It would then take each .wav file, and 
play it with the distort instructions (I don't know about .au, but .wav 
can be changed on the fly to make the sound sound different in many 
ways), sounding like a wavetable card was playing midi files in the end. :>
But like I said, it depends how much can be done with .au, and the sound 
port should be kept open for the entire song, it would sound poorly if 
the port was opened, then closed for each .au file.

-Matt