A little piece of me died today when I read of the existence of XRNS, a music tracker format that uses XML. A music tracker format that uses XML! Can you imagine? If you can’t, Google for “filetype:xrns” to find plenty of samples.
XML:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<renoisesong doc_version="10"><br>
<globalsongdata><br>
<octave>4</octave><br>
<editstep>1</editstep><br>
<loopplay>false</loopplay><br>
<loopcoeff>4</loopcoeff><br>
<loopstart>96</loopstart><br>
<beatspermin>123</beatspermin><br>
<ticksperline>3</ticksperline><br>
<shuffleisactive>true</shuffleisactive><br>
<shuffleamounts><br>
<shuffleamount>36</shuffleamount><br>
<shuffleamount>68</shuffleamount><br>
<shuffleamount>67</shuffleamount><br>
<shuffleamount>47</shuffleamount><br>
</shuffleamounts><br>
<songname>Untitled</songname><br>
<artist>By Somebody</artist><br>
...<br>
</globalsongdata><br>
...<br>
</renoisesong>
And on it goes. It’s difficult to articulate why this feels so heretical. It’s like those old MOD/tracker formats were designed to be so pure, so efficient. This completely destroys that. Now your playback engine has to carry the baggage of a full XML parsing library.
There are elements of the FFmpeg development team that would enjoy seeing the program grow to be able to handle all the various tracker-type formats (myself included, obviously). It’s not going to be pretty when XRNS collides with FFmpeg.
