tribby@hpindda.HP.COM (David Tribby) (06/03/89)
A while back somebody asked about the format of the Music Construction
Set (Electronic Arts) instrument files. I haven't entirely them,
but did find out one piece of interesting information...
I recently got the IIGS Source Code sampler and played around with the
program that uses sound tools. The program reads any file and plays it
as a sound wave. Not too exciting with most files (a text file is a bunch
of pops and hisses), but interesting with the MCS instrument files. When
playing the file, there's a bit of hiss followed by the instrument's sound.
I modified the program to skip over the first $900 bytes of data and play
the rest of the file. That sounded pretty good! The end of the file
must be the digitized form of the instrument's wave. Some of the instruments
only have $100 bytes of waveform (the square and triangle waves, for
example), and their sound is too quick for one playing. But the instruments
that have $8000 bytes (piano, synthesizer, etc.) sounds like a complete
note. The "letters" and "numbers" files contain four diffent words each
("One, Two, Three, Four" and "A B C D").
My next step is to build appropriate envelopes to go with waveforms and
play them through a program I'm writing that uses the Note Synthesizer
and Note Sequencer tools.
--Dave Tribby
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