Music Construction Set Instrument Conversion by David Kha 2618 N. Edith Tucson, Az 85716 ============================================ I'm not real big on shareware, but if you have it in your heart to send any money for use of my program it would be greatly appreciated. Though this is no big programming feat, I still would like something for the idea and research on the project. ============================================ Being an avid Music Construction Set user I began to wonder when EA would produce an instrument disk like they did for Instant Music. Obviously they aren't going to bother. In my quest for new instruments I ran acros a text file on AppleLink from Will Harvey which loosely explaind how to store digitized sound files as instruments on MCS. After messing around with the sounds I finally got a simple instrument to work nicely (the harp sound from Bard's Tale). It's not very difficult to do, but it's a pain to repeat if you have a bunch of sounds you want to convert...so I wrote a simple program in BASIC to do the conversion for me. The main program is only about 5 lines long, the rest of the code is just to make it easier to use. I had to keep the program short because I have found that when I load in the instrument sound for the GRANDPIANO it somehow messes with the basic program in memory. What the program does is load in the GRANDPIANO sound from the original MCS disk. The reason for loading the GRANDPIANO sound is that the special MCS instrument header is found on this file (I could just as easily load in any other of the instruments from MCS). Then the program loads in the digitized sound file that you want to use as an instrument file. The digitized sound is loaded over the sound of the GRANDPIANO, but the header is left in memory. The final step of the program saves the new sound with the old header...presto! A new MCS instrument! The program runs from BASIC, so you'll have to boot up BASIC from either the system disk or where ever you usually load BASIC from. (NOTE: You must use ProDOS to have this work properly...any version should do). The first thing you need to do when the program starts is put the Music Construction Set disk in any of the 3.5" disk drives and press a key. The program will search for the disk and load in the proper information. The next thing the program asks for is the name of the sound file you want to use as an instrument (NOTE: this must be an Apple Preferred sound file...saved in unpacked form, it will have the filetype of BIN). In the name of the file you must include any path names (ie. /MCS.INST/SOUND1). You can just type in "?" and a return and the program will ask for a path to CATalog. If you press return it will CATalog the path that it's in. Once you have entered in the name of the sound file it will load in that sound data. Finally the program will ask for the name of the instrument file you want this sound to be saved as (again, include the path like above). If that name already exists then you must try a different name. If the file name does not exist then it will procede to save the file. If there is an error in saving it is usually disk space (because digitized sounds take up quite a bit of space). It may also be due to an I/O error, or a write protected disk. You're done! You now have a new instrument for MCS! Now you can test them with your old music on MCS. =========== Suggestions =========== With some experimentation I found out several interesting things about MCS and the instruments. MCS varies the pitch of the sound files by speeding up the playback rate of the sound file. As the notes progress upward along the scale it will speed up the playback of the sound file as well as play more of it...this means if you have different information in the latter part of an instrument it will only play that information on the higher notes. Generally it works better if you use a sound with a long decay so that it doesn't sound "cut off" on the higher notes. It becomes very important to create a decay for sounds because they tend to sound "cut off" if there is none. I suggest that you use Sound Studio by Paul James to create an artificial decay. Sound Studio has a FADE OUT function which will work fine to create the decay. I have found that fading the last fifth or sixth of the file works nicely. Sound Studio is also good for editing out unwanted segments of the sound file, or lengthening it's decay. INSTRUMENTS DISK: I would like to request that anyone using this program please format an instrument disk (for your instruments) under the volume heading /MCS.INST so that we can keep all the songs using the alternative instruments reading from the same source. This way when new songs are created they will all be searching for the /MCS.INST and there will be no need for the MCS.FIX program. One last bug which I have not been able to fix is that in some sound files there is an click which can only be removed by carefully editing it over and over again until it sounds right. If anyone knows how to fix this please let me know so I can either add it to the program or something. Have fun!