Comments on: Midibeep

By: Karl McNeil

Karl McNeil — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 10:27:18 +0000

Just uploaded Mid2ASM v3.2 to WOS and emailed a copy to you Id be honoured if you would add it to your site!… Its actually an old update, dating from Aug 19/2010, but thought Id put it out there for preservation reasons, as the project is practically dead and might not see light of day otherwise…

As before: It comes in two flavours:

GUI Version (Mid2ASM):
- Allows primitive importing of .sid, .psg, .wav prior conversion to midi

CMD Version (midibeep2 found in Mid2ASM_SRC.zip):
- Allows you to shift the music up/down semitones to put within pitch range

BOTH Versions:
- Both now spit out BASIC output as well as Assembly
- Both will autocorrect notes imported if out of ZX pitch range
- Both will allow alternative formatting of either assembly (as HEX data) or for BASIC (compressing data to a REM statement)…(This is EXPERIMENTAL only!!! – Tends to fail on large listings!)…

NB: The simplify note option on the GUI version is redundant, but may be used in a future version for something.. a placeholder only… Oh, and aside from only allowing small pieces (cos squeezed onto single REM line), but experiemental compact mode for BASIC listing also pauses for some time prior playing, as it pokes all the data into memory prior playing it for speed…

Enjoy

By: Karl McNeil

Karl McNeil — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 09:51:22 +0000

Mid2ASM v3.0 sent to Gasman & WOS… Once again, the commandline version is in the source package (precompiled), and now allows parameters to adjust the fraction that determines the note lengths, and add an offset that alters the tempo.

eg: default is -M:51(0)

..where 51 is the mininote value from which all note durations are multiples and (0) is the tempo offset added during playing…

The GUI version, allows you to alter these settings via a GUI slider (if you untick the default settings in the menu first), and allows you to adjust the tempo while you listen to the PC beeper preview realtime. Hitting compile then allows you to set this tempo to output the obligatory .TAP file…

…plus the usual bugfixes… etc, etc…

This may be the end of development of this project…

..for now…

..unless I find time to reintegrate output back to BASIC using DATA statements… we’ll see… ;)

By: Karl McNeil

Karl McNeil — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 09:17:21 +0000

Mid2ASM v2.3 sent to Gasman & WOS…
- Some minor assembly optimization added (some math is precalc’ed)
- Beeper tune now plays via PC beeper after compiling for preview
- BugFIX: Menu entry now reflects whether music playing or not (STOP added)

NB: The original commandline version is in the source zip file (Its main improvements are the optimized assembly edits)

By: Karl McNeil

Karl McNeil — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 08:34:01 +0000

Mid2ASM GUI version emailed to Gasman… Now also compiles the ASM, pumps it through bin2Rem and generates autorunning TAP files…

Optimizations for speed and memory also made…
Gui allows you to preview midi music files prior converting
outputed Assembly now more compatible with other assemblers

Once again, Id be honoured to see this hosted on Gasmans page!…

By: Karl McNeil

Karl McNeil — Wed, 26 May 2010 05:58:03 +0000

Iv just emailed you a new version of your tool, renamed Mid2ASM… Thats right, it now spits out Assembly instead of BASIC… It still sounds the same, using the BEEPER, but saves space by cutting out the BASIC listing and converting the beep data into integers… If you think it is worthy of attention, then Id be honoured to see it hosted on your site…

By: Emlyn Hughes

Emlyn Hughes — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:01:53 +0000

Amazing! Everything sounds better in a spectrum.

By: matt

matt — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:32:13 +0000

KLP2: A bit, yes. You’d still have the numbers eating up space in both ASCII and floating-point form, which you could condense further with VAL (or the nasty trick of putting a 0 there in the ASCII form but poking the real floating-point value – which would eliminate any pretense of it being type-in-able, of course). Better still – and departing even further from pure Basic – would be to come up with an efficient packed byte encoding for the data, to be read via PEEK. But that’s the point at which I decided that I’d spent too long on this already :-)

By: KLP2

KLP2 — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:44:21 +0000

Wouldn’t using DATA statments instead lower the memory usage?

By: MISTER BEEP

MISTER BEEP — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:41:09 +0000

Oh, shoot.
And that’s still one audible channel!
You’re a dangerous man.
And actually the music has some weird charm in it.

But does it merge many channels into one automatically or the musician has to do that?

By: Megus

Megus — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:48:33 +0000

Gasman, you’re crazy! Really loved it :)