SNDH 4.6

It's August! This appears to be the SNDH release month so without further ado 4.6 makes it online.

As I mentioned previously it's a mixed bunch of tunes ranging from cutting edge X-Bios 32 tunes, to simple Maxymiser and Sid Sound Designer beeps.... or is that the other way round?!

In the old days I wasn't really interested in ripping and SNDHing exotic digi formats. I'm a chip connoisseur at heart, stemming from my C64 beginnings. However things changed when I wanted to listen to the superb Great Giana Sisters digi title track in Winjam and alike. The rip gave birth to SNDH-Digi. The resulting Giana conversion was pretty straight forward, similar to converting digi-drum tunes - read: MFP malarkey. Nowadays another reason for adding digi tracks is simply because most chip tunes are now included in the SNDH database. New modern tunes are practically all composed in either Maxymiser, Sid Sound Designer or Music-Mon - soon to included the DML tracker?!

Anyway I digress. One such game with exotic digi was the ancient Turbo Cup by Loriciel. At the time people thought it was a sequence of samples but it was in fact Loriciel's own in-house tracker. It amazes me that the ST did not follow the Amiga path, admittedly both machines had a myriad of exotic chip tunes in the early days but the Amiga soon progressed through SoundMon, Future Composer and later the behemoth that is Sound/Pro-Tracker to make exotic tunes the exception not the norm. The ST on the otherhand continued with individual musician assembly routines right to the twilight of the ST. At least this keeps me in a job. Back to Turbo Cup, the rather funky composition was by Michel Winogradoff. Thankfully he kept the same music code for future Loriciel releases: Bumpy and the weird but cool: Disc.

Above: L-R Turbo Cup, Disc & Bumpy

I hate the Unknown Composers folder. Why oh why didn't Sid Sound Designer have a nice composer field, why didn't game manuals have full credits? We will never know. At least as we move forward snippets of information appear which reduce those unknowns. This time tunes gaining rightful ownership include a batch of tunes from Jovis of Zuul. Delirious Demo 2 reset (a common tune in cracktros) which now sits with Stan Mercury of OVR, originally this was in Unknown, then it moved to Doclands. However Doclands has confirmed he simply improved Stan's song to make it "listenable!". Other tunes finally credited include Karate Kid II (by the legendary Steve Bak).

"Bittner, bit, bit, bit ,bit Bittner" carrying on the digi exotic theme. The classic Bittner rap makes its rather belated entry into the database. Sampled sick.... so love that.

Above: Bittner rap!

ST News editor Richard Karsmakers decided to convert some of his old demos to the CODEF framework <http://st-news.com/issues/bonus-materials/>` , the demos mostly feature tunes written in Activision's Music Studio. His work identified that some Music Studio SNDH files did not sound 100%. On closer inspection it was because I had re-written the play routine to work with Timer C. However, I've have now reverted to the original play method using Timer A at a rather speedy 980hz! As well as the MS files, Richard sent me tonnes of X-Bios 32 tunes, these are now in the archive as well. An added bonus is that I've written two little utilities to automatically convert X32 and Music Studio files to SNDH. See the tools section on the SNDH page.

New composers this release :- Fred Eric Gerard (Titus programmer responsible for Crazy Cars III and Super Cauldron), yqn, Lonestar, black (active coder and composer!), Mr Man, Ged and Michael Open.

We have a smattering of new tunes too. Tomchi, DMA-SC, gwEm, !cube, xfalcon, 505, 7AN, Wiecz0r, Lotek & EIA continue to fly the flag. All credit to you 21st century YM troopers.

Finally, the SNDH database now contains 499 different composers.... so... who is gonna be number 500!?