Amiga music playback thingy

[padman]

Ok, here's something I've been fiddling about with lately. It would be nice if some of you guys (especially with Windows Vista/7) could test it and tell me if it works or not.

What is it?
Now, this little program uses the good old in_sk00l.dll Winamp plugin some of you might have heard of already for Amiga music playback. That's nothing new (both the dll and using it in your own program) and not my achievement either. BUT, what always bugged me is that you couldn't select the subsongs, since this could only be done in a modal(!) dialog with a slider which made it pretty much unusable in own prods, especially when in fullscreen mode. It really sucks, when your demo/intro/ whatever switches back to the desktop for changing subsongs... Well, now a couple of Peeks and Pokes later, I can switch the subsongs without the bloody modal dialog. YAY! And even the automatic max subsong detection works. (not always, but quite often )Since this is kind of a wild (i.e. crap) "hack", involving 2 dlls in memory and the afore mentioned peeking and poking I'm not sure if that works especially on newer machines. That's why I decided to put it up here. If it works, I might do a retro Amiga chip disk or something, dunno yet...  The GUI was quickly hacked together to show it here, so if it has bugs it doesn't really matter. What I'm after is crashes or odd behavior regarding the music playback.

Formats that can be replayed this way and make it quite handy imho:

Sound-/Noise-/Star-/Ultima-/Pro-Tracker (*.MOD)
Brian Postma's SoundMon (*.BP;*.BP3)
DigiBooster (*.DBM)
SoundFX (*.SFX)
Oktalyzer (*.OKT;*.OK)
Future Composer (*.FC;*.FC3;*.FC4;*.FC13;*.FC14)
DeliTracker CUSTOM (*.CUST;*.CUS;*.CUSTOM)
David Whittaker (*.DW)
Jochen Hippel (*.HIP)
SidMon 1 (*.SID1)
Fred Monitor (*.FRED)
Music Assembler (*.MA)
Mark II (*.MKII;*.MK2)
Maniacs Of Noise (*.MON)
Delta Music 2.0 (*.DM2)

Any feedback is welcome!

Cheers,
Pad

[janer]

lovely little thing (now listen to 5th gear the whole night) 


works fine here (vista) ..everything cool padman

[Dr.Death]

Works perfect for me mate  on XP

Any chance of doing this as a stand alone player for us??

They just sound SO much better in this to me anyway keep up the amazing work on this.

[Shockwave]

Good news is that this great little player works on Windows 7 too

[padman]

Thanks for testing guys!  For a change it seems as if this runs fine on all Windows platforms... 

Any chance of doing this as a stand alone player for us??

I don't know if it's really worth the effort to create a whole new standalone player out of this, since there are so many better and more compatible players available (Deliplayer, XMplay+Delix plugin etc.) but I quickly shoehorned in a very basic load option so you can play with it. Simply drag your files (one by one or it'll f**k up ) onto the listview. The file will be added to the bottom of the list right after the inbuilt songs. There's no check on extensions etc, so you might drag a text file on there, but it doesn't matter. The only thing is you won't hear any music.  To remove an entry just drag the file off the listview after you have stopped the playback. Max subsong detection doesn't work for manually loaded files yet, you can still hit Subsong+ and it'll change the songs if there are any. If you don't hear anything anymore then you are out of subsongs Changing subsongs works for CUSTOM, HIPPEL and WHITTAKER format so far. There are more formats that might contain subsongs, only the first song is played then.

Enjoy!


[Edit] Attachment removed. New version available in the 1st post!

[Dr.Death]

Thanx for the quick hack on this one m8 

I think it would be a nice tool to have by someone on this board but that is up to you.

I hope you do an Amiga chipdisk now you know it works 

[Clyde]

Wonderfull work Padman dude, i've tried it out on XP, and I really like the mention of maniacs of noise to me they are leg ends.

im installing vista in an hour or so,and will let you know if anything happens, if it does that is.  I do know that alot of game music played really nasty as they didnt make the direct audio backward compatable or words to that affect.

were can I find some maniacs of noise .mon formats dude, and will tryout some drag and dropping!

[padman]

Thx mate!

were can I find some maniacs of noise .mon formats dude, and will tryout some drag and dropping!

Try:

ftp://ftp.modland.com/pub/modules/Maniacs%20Of%20Noise/

[Clyde]

i've just tried in Vista the flimbo's quest.mon and it has pauses between parts of the currently playing tune. it also doesn't display who it's by and any subsongs.

[padman]

Hmm, it shouldn't studder. I don't know why that is happening.

it also doesn't display who it's by and any subsongs.

That's normal because the load option was a quick (=crap) addition. The title has 12 subsongs, I'll work on that, it isn't recognised yet because of:

Changing subsongs works for CUSTOM, HIPPEL and WHITTAKER format so far. There are more formats that might contain subsongs, only the first song is played then.

Thanks for testing anyway!

[padman]

Added support for Maniacs of Noise subsong switching. Working on Fred Monitor support...
Edit: Added support for Fred Monitor subsong switching.

New version dl in the first post. Future versions will be available from there too.

[Kirl]

I've been listening some tunes while coding. I'd have seconded the request to make it into a stand alone player, but the load hack does the trick nicely! 

[Shockwave]

This is turning into a bit of a labour of love Padman Nice work.

[padman]

This is turning into a bit of a labour of love Padman Nice work.

Yeah, well, what can I say, I like coding useless stuff especially when it's kinda retro... 

So here ya go guys. Time for an update:

Added:

Max Subsong detection for all formats. 
File extension check. (No more dragging txt files on the window  )
Path shortened to file name only in the listview.
A couple of bugs.

Removed:

A couple of bugs.


Plans:
I think I'll make a complete standalone player out of this, even if I first didn't want to. That means the inbuilt songs will be removed, volume control will be added and blah blub blah. Just stay tuned. You'll see

Enjoy! (Dl in the first post.)

Pad


Edit: I just found out, that UPX had somehow f***ed up the subsong detection. (I truly hope it isn't useless completely  ) I think it's fixed now. If not, please let me know!

[Dr.Death]

They all work fine to me Padman 

I can't wait for the proper standalone player now 

[padman]

Just found out that there are still some probs with the subsong detection for manually loaded songs on other machines than mine in the new version. Looks like a cock up with the memory pointer. I thought I had fixed that. I'll look into that asap. probably on Monday. So if anybody gets only 1 or even better 63562653 (i.e a random high number) subsongs and knows that there should be more than 1 subsong, please let me know. Thx! 

Edit: DL version rolled back to v1 with the basic load option until further notice. I have to fix that memory pointer problem first, which isn't all that easy 

[Pixel_Outlaw]

Oh man this thing is so cool, bringing back a lot of memories!

[bikerboy]

nice job there m8 

indeed those tunes takes us really back

you know for me it doesn't matter if there are 1.000.000 players out there, what matters is that i'm using a player that one of us in this forum created (in this case you).

that's what matters for me 

[padman]

Thanks guys! Glad you like it! (eventhough it's not even half finished yet ) Your comments just encouraged me to embellish the existing player a little and to release some sort of a "final version" in the near future.  So stay tuned. Due to DMA I probably won't get the max subsong detection to work though. At first I thought I had found a static memory pointer to the address where the subsong value is stored. But nu uh, it's not static. My computer just tricked me once again. And I guess DLL injection or code caves are not an option nor necessary (besides the fact that this is all Greek to me  ). That'd be like breaking a fly on the wheel, since there are way better players around anyways.

[bikerboy]

(besides the fact that this is all Greek to me  )

hey if it's Greek i can translate