famitone 2 and volume

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FrankenGraphics
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Re: famitone 2 and volume

Post by FrankenGraphics »

Oh. Didn't know that but i think that's a deal breaker for most of my arrangements. i use 0 frequently to cause a delay at the beginning of a note, and to distinguish bass notes, aswell as for a brief one- or two-tick pause before a slapback echo.
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rainwarrior
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Re: famitone 2 and volume

Post by rainwarrior »

FrankenGraphics wrote:i think extra envelopes can still add these to the composition, if one feels the need: 1-5 (examples omitted)
Well, there's a lot of ways that you could recurve that multiplication table, but at the same time, every step you get quieter there's less possibilities anyway. This is throwing increasing amounts of data at something that has less and less capacity for it to matter. This is more or less why I'll say that it's really never come up for me, it's not "I need a custom envelope for volume 2", it's "there's not much precision at volume 2", and a custom quiet envelope probably isn't going to solve that. (I think in cases of low volume precision, I tend to turn to other things like pitch envelope to break the flatness, sort of how ZX spectrum art often seems to use hue as a substitute for its lack of intensity levels.)
FrankenGraphics wrote:
rainwarrior wrote:I'd probably rank a volume column higher than pretty much every control? More than vibrato/pitch envelopes for sure.
Just curious... Is that desert island choice assuming a vibrato/pitch effect is in place or not?
Yes, hypothetically I'd rank it above vibrato/pitch both envelopes and effects. I reduced it to absurdity there, though, like obviously it shouldn't be taken instead of volume envelopes since the trivial set of 15 volume envelopes should do the same thing, my point was just that they are very important to me.

Really, though, having had some more time to think about why I find it so important, it's that envelopes are a cookie cutter, making copies of the same sound everywhere it's placed. Envelopes are a bad tool for one-off uses, their utility vs data size is not good if you only need it in one place for a transition, etc. That's where effects come in, but most of all the volume multiplier: it's the most useful one because it lets you balance and contour, and it helps tremendously in making smooth transitions from one section to another. Used with envelopes it lets you reuse them a lot more. You talked about wanting to do quiet variations with bespoke envelopes; if it's a 30 byte envelope, you're talking another 30 bytes for every level you want to set! The volume control can set a new level of balance with only 1 byte per section of the piece, not 30. The combination has a ton of utility. I think it's the best tool Famitracker has for creating the large scale structure of a piece, which is why there's a lot of things I'd trade for it, if I was forced to.
dougeff wrote:Another limitation of the famitone system, that I personally found a bit annoying, is... it interprets any volume of zero, in a volume envelope, as the end of the note...and simply erases any part of the envelope beyond that. I had to use volume of 1 for mid-envelope silence, which is still noticeable some times.
When working on HH1 I patched its exporter to stop effects as Cxx rather than volume 0. I think I passed a patch for that on to shiru and he said he incorporated it... I haven't checked though.

As I recall, I also changed the engine to permit more than 256 bytes in a sound effect (the project had some long ones), though even though it was only a tiny change I don't think shiru was interested. I think he thought of such long effects as a size problem of their own, so didn't want it to be a feature.
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dougeff
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Re: famitone 2 and volume

Post by dougeff »

I believe I'm mistaken. famitone2 doesn't cut volume envelopes early, even if they have zero volume in them. I'm not sure where I got that from, maybe a much earlier version??

(tested it on 2 versions of famitone2, both worked as they should, with full volume envelopes correctly put into the data).
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rainwarrior
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Re: famitone 2 and volume

Post by rainwarrior »

Oh, I thought you were talking about sound effects, those were cutting off data at the end at some point.
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