Amiga tracker sound on Renoise, is it possible?

Ideas & suggestions
#1

Hi all,

Have recently been playing around with this Protracker 2 emulator, and the sound on it is pretty bang on compared to the original program on the Amiga. I find it amazing that you can literally just drag on a WAV file and it’ll convert to IFF, and sound legit.

One thing I was always hoping for in Renoise was a mode which mimicked the sound of the old amiga trackers, in both the conversion to 8 bit and also the way that playing the sample at diff pitches affects the sound. This pitching sound was always such a big factor of what made the Amiga sound so rugged.
It’s funny if you save a mod file in the pt2 clone, then open it in Renoise, it’s like it’s had all of that rough Amiga charm removed from the samples.

Since the pt2 clone can run on both Windows and Mac, and the clone source code is here on Github I wondered if there would be some way to copy the audio processing qualities into Renoise somehow, maybe as an ‘amiga mode’. I know nowt about coding, but to my mind if it’s possible in this emulator, there must be a way in which those conversion and pitching algorithms can be copied!

Big up all Renoise dev team. If this is possible, I think many many people would love it.

#2

In the song options of Renoise you can set the pitch behavior from “Renoise” to “Amiga” so at least it will scale similarly. Soundwise, you could try turning off any interpolation in the instrument editor sample properties window. Still, it wont sound the exact same as on the Amiga.

#3

Ah yeah I played around with those settings but as far as I can tell all it was changing was the range that’s available rather than the way the sound itself is processed. That super crispy sound you get pitching around on the Amiga is what I’m after.

#4

You’re better off getting a real second hand Amiga imo, Renoise is not designed to be the ultimate oldschool tracker emulating machine and probably will never be. It’s great it can open the old mods though for pimping them, processing with vst etc, remixing the structure into something new.

#5

Linux may not be supported by the developer (@8bitbubsy ?), but seems to compile.

#6

Yeah, I don’t fully support Linux, but at least I try to make it compile properly and work for the most part.

1 Like
#7

A little something worth pointing out (as a rare thing) @8bitbubsy.

I load a module that has a full 20 characters in the song name (for example):

fullname

Rare, yes, but could happen with other programs that don’t fully adhere to 19 characters and a null terminator. If the user doesn’t modify the song name and saves this module, your program can write spurious characters in the file name. So you could get:

mod.this is fullnameBV.mod

As far as I can quickly see Line 129 of pt_module_saver.c (https://github.com/8bitbubsy/pt2-clone/blob/master/src/pt2_module_saver.c#L129) defines a local char filename[128] array. It’s probably getting it from that array as it is not initialized to 0 before use i.e.

memset(fileName, 0, sizeof(fileName));
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#8

Thanks, I made a commit to the GitHub repo to fix this. I also had to fix it for sample saving, exact same issue. :slight_smile:
Not sure when I’ll release a new version though, might not be until a long while since I don’t have any critical bug fixes yet.

EDIT: I decided to release a new version just from these two fixes after all, because this bug can lead to a crash in some instances. I think it’s important enough.

5 Likes
#9

Amiga mods run partwise good, partwise horrible on Renosie. joyride.mod and Space_debris.mod for instance run horrible.

#10

In my opinion the most important thing about the Amiga sound is the bit reduction to 8 bit. If you run ALL samples in your project through a bitcrusher with the right settings you can get it to sound really close without resorting to use those archaic programs. Octamed and ProTracker have a lot of nostalgia attached to them but really in their essence they are awful to use and navigate.

3 Likes
#11

Decimort VST has a lot of Amiga presets, so perhaps in combination with other tips on here you could try to make it work?

1 Like