derek@speedy.WISC.EDU (Derek Zahn) (06/19/87)
I think it is great that there are IFF standards (SMUS and 8SVX) for music. This means (theoretically) that people can trade music back and forth on bulletin boards and whatnot as freely as they do IFF pictures. Supposedly. However, the only music files I have seen are in "DMCS" format. Is this SMUS? If so, either I am stupid or DMCS does not use "standard" SMUS or the public domain SMUS players on a Fred Fish disk do not work properly (or some combination thereof). I have seen some interesting-looking music available for downloading on some of the local BBSes (1812 Overture with cannons, Pink Floyd songs, etc) and I think it would be great if every Amiga owner could listen to them. Is there a public domain player out there that will play DMCS songs? Is there a Real Standard that is being used? Requiring everyone to buy DMCS just to listen to the songs is like making everyone who wants to listen to records buy a recording studio. This frustrates me, because I think the potential for lots of musical interchange and enjoyment is great; except I, for one, am unable to participate. I could see a Fred Fish disk of just music; heck, if everyone who was interested could listen to the music, I might even buy DMCS and do some composition myself! What a boon to hobbyist-composers! Am I missing the boat completely here, or what? I would be willing to put substantial effort into a public domain "jukebox" program that would organize songs and instruments and play selections, if only I knew what format(s) needed to be supported. One would hope that SMUS as specified would be enough, but apparently not; the PD SMUS players say "IFF error" whenever I try to download and play songs. Comments? Help? Suggestions for features of a "jukebox" program? derek
ralph@mit-atrp.UUCP (Amiga-Man) (06/19/87)
Derek, First I think the idea of all music application using the same format is vital to the usefulness and *fun* of using the amiga in that domain. I just wanted to throw in a little suggestion for a feature in the juke box player you mentioned. Wouldn't it be neat if it presented a "jukebox-like" screen to you where you could select from all the songs in that directory, and then have each of them performed in sequence, and even loop the whole thing. Sort of like a DPslide for music, but unlike DPslide, witha much better interface. While I'm here...how about a better DPslide ? This old version 1.0 has lots bugs...I have an application that it performs rather poorly at too: our cable system has an Amiga hooked up, but it has only 512K. I want DPslide to play pictures out of RAM disk (CHIP ram), but along with the storage for each picture, I also have DPSLIDE loading 2 others, the one it's showing now and the one it's preloading. Hence I'm out the storage for two pictures I could have stored. Fast RAM fixes this, but it would be neat to have DPslide bring all the pictures from disk to ram, and then, sort of like the resident command (ooooo!) just set of a screen pointer to use the data already sitting in chip ram. Again fast ram calls for a different solution. And a harddisk makes this less important, but I can't afford one yet....and neither can MIT cable(I think). But you should see the monitors around campus....each one popping up Amiga images....fun!
hatcher@INGRES.BERKELEY.EDU.UUCP (06/20/87)
In article <3702@spool.WISC.EDU> derek@speedy.WISC.EDU (Derek Zahn) writes: >However, the only music files I have seen are in "DMCS" format. Is this >SMUS? If so, either I am stupid or DMCS does not use "standard" SMUS or the DMCS supports two formats: IFF SMUS and its own private IFF DMCS format. The latter is an unpublished IFF format (which is just crying to be reverse engineered). Therefore SMUS players will not understand DMCS format files. Note that the IFF standard allows for "secret" formats like this; the file header makes it clear that it is an IFF file, and it is composed of a sequence of chunks, each of which is a 4 byte identifier followed by a chunk length, so IFF dump programs can print out each chunk, but we don't know what each chunk signifies (without guessing, that is). Sonix produces standard IFF SMUS files except that there are chunks named SNX1 in them. As far as I know the contents of such chunks are unpublished, but the rest of the file should be playable by any SMUS player (IFF file readers are supposed to ignore unknown chunk types rather than breaking). I haven't tried this, though. Since you *do* have the option, it seems that it would be a kindness to post the SMUS format of compositions rather than DMCS. Unless... does anyone know whether the DMCS format supports musical features that SMUS doesn't? And how about the SNX1 chunks that Sonix produces? If the features were reverse engineered then they could be added to the public SMUS standard and we'd all be happy. Since some people will always (Murphy's Law) post DMCS files, it would be a public service to convert them to SMUS and repost to the bulletin board. Doug Merritt ucbvax!ingres!hatcher (thru Jun 28) or ucbvax!unisoft!certes!doug
peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter DaSilva) (06/23/87)
DMCS isn't SMUS. In fact DMCS isn't a published format. *HOW*ever, Deluxe Music will save a file in SMUS format (though it loses repeats and clobbers triplets). There are several SMUS players available: two on one of the recent Fred Fish disks. Before I quite filled up workbench I had La Bomba playing in the background while I booted... just for the hell of it.