psycopathicteen wrote:I find the hard part, running from computer program to computer program, hoping that it sounds like how you want it to sound, and then finding out it's at a wrong pitch, or you looped it wrong, or it doesn't fit, or you down sampled it too much.
Pitch is not as much of a concern for me, as I use Schism Tracker and Mukunda Johnson's SNESMod to test my conversions (Schism Tracker doesn't auto-tune, but I can enter a nice default pitch value in there). SNESMod itself can handle the tuning fine, although I do have to watch out for pitch limits (it's 128,000hz, and Schism Tracker can technically tell me when I'm going over if I have the right view present while playing the song).
I don't use SNESGSS due to a combination of a platform incompatibility and what I found out about the sound driver looking at what it uses for pitch adjustments (I thought I could, in theory, simply implant my own samples into a compiled version of the sound driver. I found a complication in doing that via the tuning, citing a failure to adjust for octaves). However, I also knew of a trick with the sound driver that allows me to pull off a synth-like effect (although I don't create the samples in real time, instead I simply store all of the segments in the SPC700 at once and then change the ID back and forth).
Plus, I'm tempted to just create my own sound driver, as I have discovered several weaknesses within the sound driver I currently use (and I have some theoretical pitch tuning code I could use with the help of a lookup table for multiplication and a constant to start with).
On my end, it's more along the lines of testing special features, such as pitch modulation and noise (I made special modifications in order to get this to work), and some unexpected side effects, especially the way SNESMod handles its envelopes. Plus, panning effects, under any circumstance, could be a challenge to get sounding good due to hardware limitations, since there's no automation for changing the panning within the hardware. In addition, I sometimes deliberately keep a glitched conversion of a sample to use in the song.
I have another note: if your attack is instant and you choose to start your sample immediately, take special precaution with the first few samples (the first 8 are what I note down). I usually do an 8-sample fade if I find my conversions getting a bit too much pop to tone down the effect.
I have a simple idea running through my head: why not create a WAV to SPC converter, with code that simply plays back the sample in question (you'll have to manually define a pitch)? It makes for a very quick test of your sample to see if it sounds correct to your ears.