I've been considering for a good while trying to reduce MB usage in maps with music by loading in a couple octaves of fairly short-duration notes and composing via triggers. I think I may have heard of someone making a map where players could do this, but I'm not sure.

The gist is that there would only be one instrument probably, 2-3 octaves, with a few drum sfx. I think music adds a lot, and using this method, while being slightly more string intensive, would be the answer to short annoying loops and/or small number of songs in a single map. I have not yet tested how much space it would approximately take, or how to get the sounds at all yet, but I believe it wouldn't need to be very good quality at all. It'd just sound kinda electronica-esque if anything, providing it's not static, I think.

Has anyone done this/was it a good effort etc? Anyone know any potential flaws/issues that may come up? I know the game won't always run at the same speed, but perhaps it would still sound decent enough.

I don't know of anyone who has done this before, and personally, I think this idea is ingenious. It would have a much better space used to sounds output that putting a short tune in and looping it. Unfortunately, I already see some possible problems. First off, composing it would take forever, and even if you had sheet music to just copy, it still might take a long time to copy it into starcraft. This isn't such a huge problem, as using notepad++ and macros will significantly reduce the time to trigger this. The possibly more serious issue, but I think is fixable, is that most audio files have a bit of no-sounds at the end, and music with lots and lots of rests in it will sound very bad. Maybe you can use it to your advantage though. If so, good for you; you're a musical genius.

no sound at the end, you say... do you mean both ends or just the end end? In any case, you can always have multiple files playing at once... the delay should be fairly similar one would hope, so I don't see the potential problem there much.

I compose some in midi, though I admit I usually don't finish =P. In any case, I'm not trying to write the 5th symph in there... just some basic stuff... maybe mood stuff, mostly for an RPG in this case.

My method was probably going to just be labeling each file A1-12, B1-12, C1-12 for A-C being octaves, 1-12 being individual notes. Music can be minimalistic and somewhat random timing and still sound quite acceptable. The random timing becomes a problem when you get a real rock beat going or something very based off the beat. In any case, I figured on making the midi song first, and then working off that. I use the "piano roll editor" anyways, so i can count the half-steps easily. Copying trigs will help, though both the death count time and note will be edited. Also, it will be nice to just copy a whole section occasionally, but once again the time must be edited.

Oh yes, one issue I forgot to mention is the use of hyper trigs. Basically you'll have about 1/12 of a second for each minimum beat, and you have to compose around that > >. This can be somewhat limiting, but is not a much of a problem for slow songs.

er - if you wanted to do sixteenth notes as the fastest note with 1/12 of a second sounds, you could have a song that is at most 180 BPM. Not many songs go faster than that, especially ones with 16th notes. With 32nd notes, you could go 90 BPM, still not really a problem, not many songs have 32nds and go 90 or more.

I like your idea a lot.
I assume you would use death counts to keep track of where you are in the song.
The bad parts are:

1. Let's say you have a song that is BPM 90. The first quarter note is a quarter note. A quarter note at 90 would require 8 triggers like this:

Conds: death count is 0
Action: Increase Death count by 1
Play wav

Conds: Death count is 1
Action: Increase Death count by 1
Play wav

etc. until you have 8 of these.

That's the bad news.

The worse news is that a whole note would take 32 triggers. One of the concertos I'm playing right now has 342 bars. To create my concerto, you would have to do um lets see... 1044 triggers, each with on average 6 or 7 wavs being played.

2. Every sound must have it's start and end blendable so that whole notes sound like whole notes and not like a bunch of 32nd notes. At 1/12 of a second per byte, that means no vibrato or anything to that nature. My point - it... could get annoying.

The good parts are:

1. You can have as many parts as you want playing!!! WOWOWO(right?)

2. You could make whole orchestra parts if you feel like 1024 triggers! Wowowowwoow thats mind-boggling.

3. Most likely you won't have a songs that is as long as my concerto, so you'll probably have to do like 150 triggers for a small song.

4. It takes hardly any space. Every octave that you decide to add takes 1 second of space (considering that an octave has 12 notes in it). Then add a drum thing which with a couple beats would take just a few seconds. (note-before creating the beat, make sure to decide the BPM.)

5. You have help. (Pm me )

Also using this you could have a map that is called "song writer" or something like that and it would take a hell of a long time to make but it would be sooo cool.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 21 2008, 3:25 am by madroc.

Yeah, actually, I was intending to never have long-held notes, hence why I said "fairly short-duration notes." In other words, if the notes were very close together, they would overlap a bit. This will occasionally not sound great, but in general it'll sound okay. I mean, play a song on the piano with the sustain pedal always on and i just sounds like you're playing in a cathedral or something =P. If the notes are far apart, it'll sound like it's just fading out quickly. In fact, that's what I intended to make them sound like. so you would never be stringing notes together... believe me, I considered that option and didn't like the idea of making them flow together. Probably close to impossible to make sound decent. Yes, DC for timer, another DC to identify song, probably 2 total.

thanks for the offer, but I'd have to hope that meant with the RPG music and not some music writing program that really wouldn't be that fun to play more than once with people =P. And it's not like I'd hold any ownership on the idea lolz... don't even know if it'll work well yet.

I'll do some experimenting and report back with the results.

I also had this idea, but also extended it into an RPG idea, where you fit music-hating cretins by playing songs (probably try and mimic a tune being preplayed, almost like DDR).

Then the warrior classes would be different musicians. "FEER MAH TUBA MIGHT!".

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 21 2008, 4:15 am by The Great Yam.

MillenniumArmy just used it in Mini Game Party, he has a couple sounds he combines for his music, the main problem with this is that your precision can only he 42 milliseconds at the most, and that's if you're using waits, if you're using death counts you can only get a precision of 84 milliseconds, so you have to get the sounds to be the perfect length for the best quality.

Easy enough, there's this handy dandy little editor called Audacity that lets you edit music samples pretty precisely.

Yeah, I used that to cut up my wavs into multiples of 84 for this latest map of mine.

Like Falkoner has already mentioned, I'ved used this in quite a bunch of my maps. Every map of mine in which you hear drumbeats use this method. I do it primarily so that first: I can make the beat however I want (i use to play drums alot) and second: I can stop or play the music wherever and whenever I wanted to (like for Hot Potato and Musical Chairs). And third and most importantly: I just own falkoner at life. The only problem is that when the game starts lagging, the looped sounds will sound extremely choppy. But this is almost negligible compared to how great this method can be.

where can i find a tone that is completely steady for editing with audacity to cut it down to 84 millis?

Yeah, but I almost find that the music immediately starting up again makes up for this.

Yeah, I tried this a while ago, and I failed miserably, I just can't compose music, and I was at the time trying to use SC sounds for it. I've often thought of doing it again, but I don't have the time. Perhaps multiple deaths for beat and bar counters would work...

I just need a completely steady tone (no wiggles!) and i think i can do it awesomely! Help!

Audacity can make you a steady tone, with the tone command, just set the frequency and you're good to go (google tone frequencies, I think A is 440)

I still think this effort won't pay off well. You'll probably tend to have skips here and there, and that tone will just sound broken most of the time. think of the sound of many repeating small beeps. If the sound is a soft enough tone, and not ear-grinding, it may still work out tho. One other problem is that it may occasionally overlap, though I'm not sure how likely that is if you test it well... i assume the trigger speed will rarely "speed up" at all compared to testing it with a single player. If it does overlap though, it will occasionally get louder, which would be annoying. I still think it'd be better to just have semi-short tones and make it like you're playing a steel drum with slightly longer-held notes.

Fellow drummer eh. I've done a little drumming in my time. Not enough to be good though. Just a year of lessons and rare practicing... but I'm the only one good enough to play drums okay in Rock Band lolz. But yeah, percussion is in my blood... i need those drum synths.

Yeah i got to say; most likely my method won't work but I'm still dying to find out

Hey madroc, it's been a week, I was wondering if you'd experimented much with this method of yours yet. Any results? not that it's urgent, just curious.

Well about a week ago I experimented using the "create tone" in Audacity and I found that if I create a tone that is 1 second long, copy that, paste it at the end, paste another at the end of that, and another at the end of that, so on, there is no break in the tone.

However, if I try to make it any smaller than a second there is a significant break.

I noticed that there are 24 sort of "parts" to a second (like there are 24 squiggle things) and I'm not sure if those are significant or not.

Since then I have been too busy.

I'll keep you posted.

EDIT: if each trigger cycle is 1/8 of a second it should work

EDIT: OK I think I found a way to do it. Unfortunately it requires 3 different sounds for each tone you want. I'll test it out tomorrow to see if it actually works.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Aug 29 2008, 7:17 am by madroc.