Experiences (bad) with maxYMiser and MusicMon

[atarisince1989]

Not been doing anything with trackers since probably the early 90s (and it was on a PC) I decided to experiment a bit on my Atari. I got maxYMiser Live 1.29, but I found it quite complicate for a newbie, so I got Music Mon v2.5e instead, which is very straight forward. In minutes I mastered how to use the program and had a little tune composed.

Then I thought to go back to maxYMiser, so I can take advantage of the MIDI features. Not wanting to start from scratch with my song (it sounds pretty good already ), I thought "MM can save SNDH format and maxYMiser can read it. Great! Let's do it". But then came the disappointment

The song in format SNDH saved on MM seems all OK, as I can play it on SNDPlayer 1.51, but when trying to load it on maxYMiser I just got an error. Not too much information though, just saying that the operation has failed.

Does anybody have knwoledge about what it could be failing? Or has anybody tried something similar? Thanks a lot.

PS: Another problem I have with maxYMiser is that I cannot run it on my 520STe 4MB RAM. It runs perfectly on my Falcon030, but on the STe I just get a blank screen. I tried both to load from the UltraSatan and from FDD, with exactly same result.

[mal7921]

It may be worth looking around the tinterwebby thing for one of those old ST utilities which made the machine think it had less RAM and try maxYMiser again. The reason I suggest this is that I had a similar issue on the Mac a few years ago with another set of programs. I put it down to bugs, however it turned out one of the RAM banks was failing. In general use the machine was fine but once you loaded something that was more RAM intensive, things got wierd very quickly.

The other thing to try is mailing the author, details can be found here.

[atarisince1989]

Hi Malcom, thanks a lot for the information. Would never occur to me something like that about the memory Do you have that software you said to make the machine think it had less RAM?

Also, I'll contact gwEm and I'll post here any information he may give, for use to others.

[atarisince1989]

Wow, I sent an e-mail to gwEM and he replied to me in just 6 minutes! Kudos to him.

Below is his reply:

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1) Yes, the .SND standard is non compatible between trackers. maxYMiser is only able to read SND files generated in maxYMiser.

2) Don't load maxYMiser from the autofolder unless you plan to use it in screen-less mode.

[mal7921]

Ah, SND is like OMF, a none standard standard that can vary from application to application (Just ask anyone struggling to transfere an OMF file between Cubase/Nuendo and ProTools!).

It makes sense now, sort of...

I'm hoping to get AceTracker or Digital Home Studio on one of my Falcon's soon to have a play, not used a tracker program since around 1993(ish)

[yerzmyey]

Well, as far as I know, SND is a format only to final version of one's song.
Meanwhile You'd have to save Your tune in some 'source' format, I suspect.

As for my bad experiences, I didn't manage to force maxYMizer to spit _any_ sound which is very rare phenomenon. I avoid this kind of software, however I don't doubt it's a powerful utility. But I never got back to it.

MusicMon was much more resonable in usage. Also Stu/DropDaBomb makes incredible things with it, so it must be possible to make decent music on it.
My problem is - ZX Spectrum's tracker use YM in veeeery different way, so I had to get used to it.

[atarisince1989]

Hi Yerz, I agree with you, maxYMiser is probably a brilliant piece of software, but man you need a doctorate to make it work

I spent like 2 hours, even with the tutorials from the website, before I could heard a single sound coming out the speakers. With MM was like unzipping, loading an instrument and starting hitting keys. The help is just 1 page you get pressing Help, but in a very few minutes I was already doing copy&paste between channels and paterns, mastering the digital part. All very easy. The reason I wanted to use maxYMiser is because I do (or used to do ) a lot of MIDI.

BTW, I just remembered that some time ago (I think was around October) you uploaded to my FTP some EBM and RAVE samples for me to use. I apologies or not trying it before, my life has been a kind of * since some months ago. Now I'm back to normality (or less *) and started redirecting myself. Anyway, I had a look to those files and I have seen that are .WAV. Please, could you tell me how I could load it on a tracker software? Thanks a lot.

[yerzmyey]

Actually I do it in a simple way -
I load them to any PC soft (FastTracker II? SkaleTracker?) save as a MOD with empty trax or as XM for Falcon, then load into Atari and use further without problems all the sound-setup.

[atarisince1989]

Great! Thanks a lot Yerz for the advice.

[atarisince1989]

I'm hoping to get AceTracker or Digital Home Studio on one of my Falcon's soon to have a play, not used a tracker program since around 1993(ish)

Never used DHS, but I have read at dead hackers society that it supports up to 32 tracks and realtime DSP effect. It could be really good to use it. I'll try to give it a try this week or weekend.

[yerzmyey]

Well, this is DHS program, for example
http://www.atarimusic.net/index.php/amn ... n030-track
But if You have original Falcon, then 8 channels is max for 44,1 quality.
I used 10 channels in this song and the quality went down (into 32 kHz, if I recall).

And again - I loaded all samples into PC's SkaleTracker, then saved an empty XM file. Loaded it into DHS - et voila.

__________EDIT_________
Which actually I would like to report to the MR ADMIN that the song doesn't play sometimes, I don't know why.

[atarisince1989]

Wow, it sounds great. But I guess is due the skills of the composer

BTW, I've seen that SkaleTracker is freeware and available for Windows, Linux and even a web version!

[mal7921]

__________EDIT_________
Which actually I would like to report to the MR ADMIN that the song doesn't play sometimes, I don't know why.

I've seen the on screen player error with error #2048 which is a Java error and issues seem to be localised to machines. For example, if I get the player error on my main internet/family mac, I don't get the error on my old PowerBook G4 or my partners Netbook.

I do need to update some of the files in the template for the site, though I need to get some specific files backed up first.

I'm also putting our main internet Mac through a thorough cleanup tonight as I've not done any maintenance on it for about 12 months, so I suspect my problem is a cache issue of some sort, either that or I need to re-install Firefox

Edit

Just to note, I have yet to see this happen in Safari or Internet Explorer so I'm beginning to think it could be an issue with Firefox and Java (Or Flash as the error also relates to a similar issue with flash), Yerzmyey which browser and operating system are you using?

[atarisince1989]

In case it helps: I could listen the song perfectly yesterday at the office on my PC with Windows XP, Firefox 3.6.13 and Java 6 Update 20.

[yerzmyey]

atarisince1989:


> Wow, it sounds great. But I guess is due the skills of the composer
--------------
Hehe, not necessarily but thx.
If You want sources to check out some commands (not too many used but still), I can point You source (2Mb) to load into the editor.


>BTW, I've seen that SkaleTracker is freeware and available for Windows, Linux and even a web version!
----------------
The tracker isn't sadly finished and probably will not be, finally, because it cannot handle big samples - I mean it loads them and play them well, but when You want to make an "offset" command, then it fails.

What I mean is: let's say You want to record vocal. At some point You want the vocal (a line or so) start _not_ from the beginning but from a half of the file. For a refrain or whatever.
Like I did in this old PC song (Pentium100, 16Mb RAM, AWE32 with 4Mb RAM on-board, "Akord" tracker, 16 channels) -
http://soytnbg.i-demo.pl/18_SOYT!NBG-Dying_(bonus).mp3
The same goes to guitars or any long sample.
And You can't make it on SkaleTracker sadly. Which is highly annoying.
it would be cool to have such possibilities on Falcon but seems like DHS Tracker doesn't like big sample AT ALL. Huge pity.