Hello everyone! This is my first post here and I don’t know if this is the right venue, but here goes:
My brother Al and I have created a web-based OctaMED-to-Renoise song converter, and hosted it online here: https://www.snappymaria.com/mmd-convert/
Does anyone out there still have old OctaMED songs in need of upgrading? (If not, you can stop reading this now…)
We did this in some free time we had over the break, mostly so that Al could port some of his old OctaMED music projects to Renoise. There’s no real documentation of it (other than this thread announcing it), it’s just a blank web page inviting you to drop a .med file on it and maybe get a Renoise .xrns file in return. The conversion takes place in the desktop browser window, so there’s no actual uploading of the music anywhere, it all happens locally on your own machine, usually quite quickly.
This doesn’t work with all the old tracker formats, just OctaMED’s uncompressed save files (MMD0, MMD1, and MMD3, and if you’re lucky MMD2 might just barely work). If you want some files to test it with, I have a few online. Al and I wrote a game called MegaBall for the Commodore Amiga way back in the 1990’s, and Al used OctaMED for all the game’s music, which is now publicly available here: https://bitbucket.org/emackey/megaball/src/master/MB_Music/
Give MBmus24.med a try, for example. Download the .med file, then visit the converter page, and drag-and-drop the .med file onto the banner requesting it, and it should give you its best effort to produce a similar-sounding .xrns Renoise file. It’s not perfect and there are no guarantees or warranties that come with this thing, it’s just a free-time side project.
The basic pattern of notes-in-tracks often survives the conversion best. The commands are trickier, as OctaMED has a very different set of commands than Renoise, but Al and I put together a translation table for ones that are the most similar. The converter will complain about commands that it doesn’t know how to translate, but will finish the conversion anyway. Commands for pitch bending and volume slides may work differently for example, so a song might need manual cleanup after the conversion if it does this kind of thing.
OctaMED also has 8-bit software “Synth” and “Hybrid” modes where synth instructions are applied to waveforms or samples. This stuff doesn’t convert perfectly, but basic synth waveforms are salvaged, and synth/hybrid volume commands are converted to similar Renoise instrument “modulation” volume envelopes. The MBmus24.med song has a few synth and hybrid instruments, which you can find in the converted result by looking through the Renoise sampler’s “modulation” tab for each converted instrument.
Anyway there’s our fun holiday project, I hope you like it! Let me know in the replies here if anyone actually starts using this, and how well that goes. Happy Renoising!