Your preferred set of music compos for a big party?
category: music [glöplog]
@Krill: As I understand it, trackers like Furnace don't prioritise having a compact "native" playable format - the best you can do is play back a register dump, which will be on the order of hundreds of Kb.
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Committee Music
Teenage Pop Music
Low-End Music (only frequencies below 220 Hz)
Tracker National Anthem Compo
32kb Streaming Music
Yes. One hundred times yes.
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Quote:Committee Music
Teenage Pop Music
Low-End Music (only frequencies below 220 Hz)
Tracker National Anthem Compo
32kb Streaming Music
Yes. One hundred times yes.
as one of the people responsible for actually having had these compos, i can assure you that at least a few of these are a tremendously bad idea
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That's pretty much streaming music then, and not executable music at all.@Krill: As I understand it, trackers like Furnace don't prioritise having a compact "native" playable format - the best you can do is play back a register dump, which will be on the order of hundreds of Kb.
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That's pretty much streaming music then, and not executable music at all.
I'm starting to understand why you guys have streaming music compos.
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Please elaborate.I'm starting to understand why you guys have streaming music compos.
(To my understanding, "streaming music" is the unrestricted demo equivalent of music for a given platform.)
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That's pretty much streaming music then, and not executable music at all.
Good job the compo in question is called "Oldskool Music" and not "Oldskool Executable Music" then. :-)
I'm glad that I'm not gasman, having to fit 15 or so years of platforms into the same compo without anyone feeling unfairly treated.
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Ah, my bad, there are no "executable" or other sub-categories to "Oldskool Music". I see your point now.Good job the compo in question is called "Oldskool Music" and not "Oldskool Executable Music" then. :-)
Would both your foreseen possible unintended consequences of an unrestricted oldskool music compo be mitigated by replaying plain MOD files on a typical Amiga OCS system (or other established vintage platforms capable of replaying those)?
Afaict, this would naturally not be a fallback to the practically unrestricted tracked music compo replayed on PC, and as for softsynth vs samples... perhaps display the prod's size on disk prominently (and also the time required to pre-render the samples)?
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Would both your foreseen possible unintended consequences of an unrestricted oldskool music compo be mitigated by replaying plain MOD files on a typical Amiga OCS system (or other established vintage platforms capable of replaying those)?
No, I don't think so. "Ensuring that 4ch MODs can unambiguously compete in oldskool music" is not the problem that needs solving here - it's clear that they could, if we wanted them to. But given that 10 out of 16 entries in tracked music this year were 4ch MODs, it seems that people are broadly happy with them being in tracked music, even if they're going to be up against a 40ch Saga Musix + Bacter magnum opus. Diverting those to oldskool music would crowd out the chiptune stuff, and leaving it open-ended for people to choose one compo or the other would suck too (see Revision 2015 and Amiga OCS demos being split between the oldskool and Amiga compos), so the only reasonable way forward is to disallow MODs (either plain or wrapped in an exe) in oldskool music. In turn, this means disallowing the <32Kb chip MODs that we did allow up to now.
(It's worth mentioning that as of this year we started formally allowing <32Kb 4ch MODs without an exe wrapper, specifically to avoid the issue of "if you want to compete on this platform, you need to be - or find - a coder" that Mibri brings up. So reversing that rule in the interest of making the compo more non-coder-accessible across more platforms does feel a bit backwards...)
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as for softsynth vs samples... perhaps display the prod's size on disk prominently (and also the time required to pre-render the samples)?
We can certainly do that, but is that going to be a backward step for those participants? It's the equivalent of saying "we're not going to have an 8K intro compo any more, but don't worry, you can still enter the 64K compo and write 'this is an 8K intro' on the beam slide".
Then again, maybe this is just the inevitable truth about the oldskool music compo, that there will always be some platforms that are technically disadvantaged relative to others, and that we're reliant on voters being able to account for that. "How will people on platform X feel about being up against hypothetical synth/sample hybrid entries" is just the next iteration of the "how do people on platform X feel about being up against AmigaKlang" debates we already have. And the argument in favour of opening up to actual real platforms (SNES / Megadrive) that are in the spirit of the compo is stronger than the argument against hypothetical platforms that aren't, so maybe I should stop worrying.
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@Krill: As I understand it, trackers like Furnace don't prioritise having a compact "native" playable format - the best you can do is play back a register dump, which will be on the order of hundreds of Kb.
i'm actually not a furnace expert, but as far as I know, for the real hardware playback case, it prioritises having a dedicated player (aka driver) routines with a limited feature set specific for the target platform (i.e. furNES), or having to deal with rather large register dump - implementing the full-fleged .fur player is a bit tricky due to enormous amount of features, plus there's no dedicated player-only library yet and tracker sources are GPLed :)
so, for Crystal Oscillator i went for heavily preprocessing and compressing the register dump, and coding the custom OPL3 player, which was basically the "musician having the coder help" approach. While I actually had much fun with the challenge of cramming all this stuff in 32kb, I would also support raising the size limit for the Oldskool Music compo - even just having it doubled to 64kb already makes it easier for the "higher oldskool" (SNES/MD/OPL) platforms, although I also believe that usual suspects like SID/AY could also benefit from it.
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I'm glad that I'm not gasman, having to fit 15 or so years of platforms into the same compo without anyone feeling unfairly treated.
i know that with years the definition of "oldskool" gets more and more blurred, but I don't think larger parties like Revision could afford one more music compo without extending the duration of the party itself - also the aforementioned size limit works well as an equalizer of plartform possibilities so one can't just submit a one big streamed sample wrapped into disk image as a music compo entry :)
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added on the 2025-05-21 16:16:30 by el mal
a party like Revision needs a 3 hours long drone compo
+1 )))
@ps! didn't you have a drone compo at lovebyte?
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Also, PC executable music compo at revision is by far the least voted for compo. Just saying.
If talking about the last Revision, it was partially because live voting was down during the whole compo, I'd assume.
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Yes, multiplatform compos seem to always be somewhere between a rock and a hard place.just the next iteration of the "how do people on platform X feel about being up against AmigaKlang" debates we already have.
In a hypothetical better world (or less-entry-flooded parties)... what could speak against a size-restricted music compo ("Oldskool Executable Music", same 32K limit) next to an unrestricted one being a-okay with disk-size (or whatever any of the given platforms typically allow) register-dump/digitised-samples/hw-synth-hybrid pieces?
Seems quite analogous to tracked-vs-streaming music and more generally demo categories with and without size restrictions, to me.
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As I understand it, trackers like Furnace don't prioritise having a compact "native" playable format - the best you can do is play back a register dump, which will be on the order of hundreds of Kb.
This is more or less exactly my issue when it comes to Mega Drive tunes! The file for my last Mega Drive music release, done in Furnace, is a chunky 288KB. I did once approach Kabuto of Titan about possibly chopping one of my WIP tunes down to size for Revision, as they did for this one, but I don't really want to make myself into a nuisance to busy coders (unless we're in the same group, ho ho...!)
Thanks for all the interesting discussion on this topic, quite interesting reading.
I would drop streaming music compos to promote ways of doing that can distinguish the computer culture from the mainstream culture. Newschool tracker compo (Renoise, OpenMPT...) might be considered as a replacement.
Likewise I would drop fast music. Fast compos are derogatory towards all the craft and art. Perhaps live coding music compos could be introduced instead (ie. something like algorave).
With oldskool and executable music compos I find it problematic that they don't transmit visual technical data of the music for the audience. That's what makes tracker compos so dressy. Might any solutions be available to fix this?
This sounds intriguing. Maybe a whale music compo too?
Likewise I would drop fast music. Fast compos are derogatory towards all the craft and art. Perhaps live coding music compos could be introduced instead (ie. something like algorave).
With oldskool and executable music compos I find it problematic that they don't transmit visual technical data of the music for the audience. That's what makes tracker compos so dressy. Might any solutions be available to fix this?
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Low-End Music (only frequencies below 220 Hz)
This sounds intriguing. Maybe a whale music compo too?
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And, as for Tracked Music... A module should fit on a floppy disk! That's what the MOD format was invented for.
When have we ever seen 2MB floppy disks? :]
well at least i dont need to build any tech.
