So it turns out that Foobar2000 now has a GEP control!
What does that mean? It means that for audio formats handled by GEP, the Game Emu Player -- such as NSF (NES), SPC (SNES), and VGM (Genesis) (but not, say PSF (Playstation) or USF (N64)) -- there is now a control where you can go in and turn on and off the individual audio tracks!
I mean, this is so great. It's really fun to play with, just turn things on and off. You can go in and like, strip out the melody, or strip out everything but the melody, or try to take out everything except what's necessary to recognize it as the same song, etc.
I used to use Meridian Advance for this. But Meridian Advance was severely limited in functionality. It couldn't handle compressed files, for instance. Or export to WAV or anything like that; if I wanted to record something -- which I did once, I recorded just the background of Devil's Laboratory -- I had to set the computer to treat the speaker output as microphone input and then separately record it in Audacity. (Although in that case I needed to further edit it anyway, as I wanted it to form a loop. Surprisingly that required cutting a little bit of the beginning, not just the end...) And I couldn't even really use it with Genesis music; it wouldn't read VGM files, only the old GYM format (and, there's a reason people stopped using that; it couldn't even do looping properly, for one thing!).
But foobar2000 does freaking everything, and now it does this too. So cool! And for SNES music there's even a visualizer, a display, that shows the state of the SPC700 chip that's being emulated, which is helpful! Basically, NES music is easy to take apart because, well, you've got square wave 1, square wave 2, triangle wave, noise. (And that 5th one that not many games seem to use.) Similarly with Game Boy. SNES and Genesis are tougher because the different audio channels could be anything; SNES has 8 and Genesis has freaking 10 (6 from the YM2612 and 4 from some other chip). So those are harder to take apart. But for SNES at least you have the visualizer to assist.
Anyway that's really neat, that's all I wanted to say right now, bye
What does that mean? It means that for audio formats handled by GEP, the Game Emu Player -- such as NSF (NES), SPC (SNES), and VGM (Genesis) (but not, say PSF (Playstation) or USF (N64)) -- there is now a control where you can go in and turn on and off the individual audio tracks!
I mean, this is so great. It's really fun to play with, just turn things on and off. You can go in and like, strip out the melody, or strip out everything but the melody, or try to take out everything except what's necessary to recognize it as the same song, etc.
I used to use Meridian Advance for this. But Meridian Advance was severely limited in functionality. It couldn't handle compressed files, for instance. Or export to WAV or anything like that; if I wanted to record something -- which I did once, I recorded just the background of Devil's Laboratory -- I had to set the computer to treat the speaker output as microphone input and then separately record it in Audacity. (Although in that case I needed to further edit it anyway, as I wanted it to form a loop. Surprisingly that required cutting a little bit of the beginning, not just the end...) And I couldn't even really use it with Genesis music; it wouldn't read VGM files, only the old GYM format (and, there's a reason people stopped using that; it couldn't even do looping properly, for one thing!).
But foobar2000 does freaking everything, and now it does this too. So cool! And for SNES music there's even a visualizer, a display, that shows the state of the SPC700 chip that's being emulated, which is helpful! Basically, NES music is easy to take apart because, well, you've got square wave 1, square wave 2, triangle wave, noise. (And that 5th one that not many games seem to use.) Similarly with Game Boy. SNES and Genesis are tougher because the different audio channels could be anything; SNES has 8 and Genesis has freaking 10 (6 from the YM2612 and 4 from some other chip). So those are harder to take apart. But for SNES at least you have the visualizer to assist.
Anyway that's really neat, that's all I wanted to say right now, bye
