Elvis
Jukebox. Clock. Alarm. And a game! Who said Elvis was dead?!

 
Current version: 1.5 (See revision history)
Requirements: Palm OS 3.5 or higher
Known issues: None
Price/registration:
$10.00
Supported devices: No limit
Required products: None
Downloads:
     
Related titles: N/A
Mania meter:

Registered users

  

Building Elvis albums

In order to build Elvis albums, one needs the Elvis Builder and appropriate MIDI files. In fact, a sample album project file would also help, since creating it from scratch would take time. Luckily, the Elvis Builder comes with such a file.

As of May 2002 the builder is rather simple and doesn't even have visual interface. All that it requires is to be passed a proper album project file for conversion (along with the builder, there is an MDB file, which, when opened with Microsoft Access may serve as some primitive user interface for organizing songs and building albums).

The project file contains some common album information, e.g. album title, database version, etc. These should best be left intact from the sample project.

After the common header, the file contains the data for each song, namely its title, author, length (currently unused), gendre, MIDI file location and lyrics (or other note). Those fields come TAB-separated and the lyrics field may use the control combination "\n" for a new line character.

If the path to the MIDI file is correct (relative or absolute), the builder will include it in the album, regardless of whether it is correct MIDI file or any other file. However, it may limit it to certain size.

Since PalmOS can only handle MIDI files of format 0, this is the format that your MIDI files should be in. All files in the downloadable sample project are in this format. Various converters on Internet will help you convert between formats 0, 1 and 2 of MIDI.

Once the album project file is created, you can drag and drop it over the builder icon in the file explorer on your desktop, or you can run the builder from the command prompt and pass it the project file as parameter.

 

 

About Elvis Sound Engine

Elvis Sound Engine (ESE) is a piece of software that can be used by PalmOSŪ developers to more easily enhance their applications with sound and effects. It is especially useful for applications running prior to Palm OS 5.0. ESE is documented, supported and freely distributable for noncommercial projects.

Along with the Elvis Album Builder, ESE allows playback of sound tracks from a sound library (album), pretty much the same way as if a separate application was run on your device. In technical terms, ESE is a shared library, which allows application to be run in the idle time that the processor takes for playing the background music. An example of that is the classic game DJ Miner, which plays music in the background while the game goes on.
 

 
Elvis is a nice little jukebox for your Palm powered handheld. You can use it for cheering up, for refreshing your musical memories, for playing a little musical quiz by yourself or with friends and finally, of course, for replacing the boring standard alarm of your handheld. Thanks to Elvis, you can now wake up every morning with a different song!

There is actually more than that to Elvis, but we will leave it to you to figure it out. All you have to do is download and run the Light version. For the lazy types, here is a list of the major Elvis features:

  Load and play various collections of MIDI songs
 
Export to standard PalmOS device date book alarm
 
Predefined sound collections (classic, film, rock, children, pop...)
 
Standard and secure modes for PalmOSŪ devices with true MIDI support
 
Background sound play (currently not available in secure mode)
 
Create your own sound collections
 
Support for lyrics or other information associated to a song
  Large and nice analog clock
 
One-tap alarm setup (a hit among frequent travelers!)
 
Preset or random alarm sound
 
Musical quiz with hi-scores

Note: Entries in green require the Elvis Pro version, which we kindly invite you to purchase. Not only you will get the described extra features, you will also help us develop more and better programs, games and sound collections for you and all other participating users. Support shareware!

By ordering Elvis Pro you will also get access to the growing collection of Elvis albums at our site. Feel free to submit and share the albums you have created yourself!


Note on hardware limitations, compatibility, Secure Mode and single- and multi-channel melodies

Some PalmOS powered devices can handle sound better than others. For example, most Palm devices are equipped with simple resonance speaker with very short frequency range and they can usually only play simple single tone melodies.

Other devices, such as Handera 330 can do a little better on the sound reproduction, but are still limited to single-tone (also called single-channel) melodies without special software efforts. In order to provide compatibility with all devices, ESE does not pay special attention to the extra Handera 330 capabilities.

Sound albums for such devices are single-channel albums. Playing multi-channel album (that is, an album consisting of multi-channel songs) on a standard Palm device is practically possible, but will hardly manage to please the ear.

There are devices, such as Sony Clie T615C, which have built-in software and/or hardware to produce better sound and eventually play several notes simultaneously. Even then, due to hardware and OS limitations they may sometimes only play well if they devote all their computing power to it. They may not do anything else when they play (or the sound would decrease its quality).

Normally, Elvis uses ESE in standard mode, which is background play. This leaves you the control over the application. On devices like Clie T615 this would result in poor sound quality, unless you switch to secure playing mode. This will stabilize the sound, but will take you away the ability to operate the application while the sound is playing. In Secure Mode, the play will continue until the music is over or until you tap the screen.

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DJ Miner with Elivs Sound Engine!

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