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FamiTracker
I made this a few days ago and it was my first creation for Super Mario 64.
Since then, I've made 4 more songs and I actually plan to do the [i]entire Super Mario 64 Soundtrack.[/i]
Now, there's a couple things about this song that's been bugging me.
1) On the 1st repeat/2nd playthrough of the song, [u]the noise channel is significantly louder than it should be during frames 03 and 04[/u], but on the 1st playthrough, 3rd playthrough, 4th playthrough, etc. the volume is exactly what it is supposed to be. I have no idea why this is occurring.
2) The second thing that's bugging me is that [u]the last frame sounds different on every repeat of the song[/u]. Why does it do this? The rest of the song sounds the same every single time (with the exception of the aforementioned noise channel glitch).
The glitches also occurred when I exported the song as a .wav file, which can be heard [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS-JGYB5W6Y]here.
Question: Is it possible to change the volume of the DPCM channel?
Or do I need to import several copies of the same sample with the desired variations in volume?
Nope, not possible to change the DPCM volume. You have to import several copies of the sound.
The volume of the noise channel probably has to do with the value the delta counter happens to be at. (The delta counter is basically the current amplitude of the DPCM channel; the DPCM hardware works by moving this counter up and down really, really fast.) When the delta counter has a high value, the noise and triangle channels will be quieter. You might try using the Z00 command in the DPCM channel to reset the counter to zero, or setting D-counter to 0 for all your samples in the instrument editor.
Oh, now that I look at it again, the noise channel is set to periodic mode (duty cycle 1) at that point in the song. That's due to the way the mode works, and futzing with the delta counter won't help you there.
The NES generates noise by basically generating a pseudorandom series of bits (1's and 0's). When you turn on periodic mode, you're telling it capture a small number of bits and play it as a short loop. The sequence of bits in the loop depends on the state of the noise generator, which is something you have no control over. In this case, the second time through the song, it happened to generate a sequence of bits that sounds louder than the other sequences.
One thing you can do is change your duty envelope for instrument 7 to "1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0". What that does is it uses duty cycle 1 for most of the sound and then suddenly switches to duty cycle 0 for the last frame of the sound. This will cause it to generate a new sequence of bits every time the sound is played. For the same reason, the sound will sound a little different every time it is played.
Wow, that's really helpful. I'm amazed that all of that made sense to me...I must be getting better :p
So what about the last frame sounding different? For example, on the first playthrough, the first half of frame 9 sounds different than the second half.
Since you play the same note on multiple channels, the waves will constructively interfere with eachother, that's just how physics works.
You can slightly detune channels by using the Pxx command. The original pitch is P80, 81 will be a bit higher, 7F will be a bit lower (mind your hex numbers!)
But the higher your notes are, the more significant the effect of the detuning is. That is because what the 2A03 (and pretty much any sound chip from the time) does, is dividing a very high frequency by a "period value". This is completely hidden from you unless you enable the Register display in the Tracker menu.
As you get to higher and higher notes, the period gets less and less and the resolution gets less and less as well, so you know, it's a huge difference if you divide something by 4 and not 3, but it's not that big a of a deal to divide something by 501 and not 500.
 (100 px).png)
