Loadstar 237/237.d81/t.sidsmith

Text File | 2004-01-01 | 5.0 KB | 173 lines

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           S I D S M I T H

     by Debby Cruz and Scott Resh
        Text by Fender Tucker


    There are two formats of of music
used here in the LOADSTAR Tower --
SONGSMITH and SID PLAYER. Most of the
jukeboxes have been in the SONGSMITH
format and just about all of the
background music has been SID PLAYER
format.  It's about time I gave you
the lowdown on these two formats.

    SID PLAYER is the player program
for Craig Chamberlain's music system
that was first published by Compute's
Gazette. It has become the standard of
the Commodore music industry and is
supported by thousands of SID
musicians. Practically every song that
can be regarded as a classic, or has
been in the top forty, has been
"SIDized" by someone.  You can
recognize the song format by the
filename -- it will have a ".mus"
suffix.

    The SID PLAYER system is very
good, and because of this, is quite
complex. It takes a while to learn the
editor, but the capabilities of it are
amazing. It does not use traditional
musical notation.

    The SONGSMITH system was developed
for LOADSTAR by the late Joe Garrett,
and is the one that Softdisk sells. It
uses traditional musical notation
(like typical sheet music) and is much
easier for beginners in computer music
and those who are familiar with
standard notation. Taking music
directly from sheet music and putting
it into computer form with SONGSMITH
is a breeze. You can always recognize
songs written in the SONGSMITH format
because there will be at least two
files for every song. One will have a
"m." prefix and the other will have a
"w." prefix.

    Unfortunately, SONGSMITH lacks
some of the intricacies of SID PLAYER,
such as the ability to write triplets
and use filtering in the music. On
most songs this will pose no problem,
but occasionally the serious computer
musician will need the superior
capabilities of SID PLAYER.

    Debby Cruz is a veteran
SONGSMITHer and SIDite and recognized
the need to be able to take songs that
were quickly and easily entered in
SONGSMITH and translate them into SID
format for the final touches. So she
teamed up with Scott Resh, Softdisk's
ML programmer emeritus, and SIDSMITH
was born.

    A converter to work the other
direction would be a lot more
complicated, but I'm going to see if
Scott and Debby might be up for trying
it. What would happen is that some of
the intricate SID touches would be
ignored or thrown away in the
SONGSMITH conversion, but the notes
would be there. Since there is a trove
of SID music around, you would have
access to it for tweaking with your
SONGSMITH program. I'll keep you
apprised.

    Here are step-by-step instructions
on how to turn your (or our) SONGSMITH
songs into SID songs.

(1) Run SIDSMITH. It asks for the
filename of the SONGSMITH song. Press
F1 to see a directory of the disk in
drive 8.

(2) At the prompt, "INSERT MEASURE
MARKERS", answer Y or N. SID EDITOR
works with or without measure markers.
It's up to you.

(3) At the prompt, "APPEND CREDITS",
answer Y or N. Both systems allow
credits to be saved with the music. If
you want credits, you must have the
SONGSMITH file with the "c." prefix on
the disk with the "m." and "w." files.
If you don't, the program will
continue okay, and you won't have
credits in your SID song.

NOTE: SONGSMITH saves credits in the
uppercase/lowercase mode. SID players
and SID EDITOR use uppercase/ graphics
mode. If you want the credits to look
right for your converted song, use
only lowercase letters when you make
the credits with SONGSMITH.

(4) If you have a drive 9 you'll get a
prompt, "SAVE TO DRIVE 9?". Answer Y
or N. You'll have your SONGSMITH disk
in drive 8 and the SID disk in drive
9.

(5) If you are using just drive 8, or
answered N to the previous prompt,
you'll get a "SAVE TO DIFFERENT DISK?"
prompt. Answer Y or N, depending on
whether you want the SID song saved on
the same disk as the SONGSMITH song.
If you answer N, then there will be a
later prompt to insert your SID disk
before the song is saved.

(6) Now you get a KEY SIGNATURE screen
prompt. This is a list of all of the
key signatures and their associated
sharps and flats. If you know the key
the song was written in, you can press
the appropriate letter from the menu.
Or you can press U for unknown and the
song will be converted in the key it
was written in. If you want to have
the song transposed to another key,
simply press the letter of that key.

(7) Finally you'll be asked to choose
between tempo 1 and tempo 2. This
strange prompt is due to SONGSMITH's
inexplicable way of saving the tempo
(speed) of a song. Either one is okay
if you plan to modify the song with
SID EDITOR. If you just plan to play
the converted song, then chose 1 if
the song is relatively slow, or 2 if
the song is relatively fast.

    That's it. The disks will whir and
the lights will flash and you'll end
up with a file with a ".mus" suffix,
ready to be plugged into SID EDITOR or
played with SID PLAYER.

    You may quit to LOADSTAR or
convert another song at this point.
Even long songs shouldn't take much
time to convert since it's all done at
ML speeds.

FT