Sunday, April 12, 2015

Getting Real Pt 12. - Running into a Brick Wall While Falling off a Cliff

So, over the weeks, I essentially transcribed and merged all of the music for all of the scoped parts, untangled the notes and gave them a more modern form, and rewrote some minor bits where Clinkster simply couldn't provide the right sounds. I actually went a little too far and even transcribed 4 patterns from the end-credits before Seven put the breaks on me. And you know what? It sounded pretty good. The sound was rich and full and exciting. It wasn't exactly the original music, but in some places it sounded (IMHO) a little bit better than the original, thanks to modern synth technology.

So what was the result? If you remember way back in Part 3, there was a four part process: compose, save, compile, compress.


The result was a 123k Renoise .xrns file. Yikes. It turns out these are already compressed files, the original .xml file in the .xrns file, the one that contains all the note data, was 8,459k. Woah. What's going on here?

Well it turns out, all I'm seeing is step 2 in this process. Again back in part 3 of this series, I discussed the "compile" and "compress" steps. I haven't done those yet! So I copied the .xrns file over to Clinkster's helpful easy_exe folder and ran it only face an explosion of errors. It turns out I had forgotten many of the restrictions I pointed out in Part 3: no effects, maximum velocity of 7F, etc. It took nearly a week to hunt all of those down and get rid of them. Finally I was ready to find out the final size of the music so Seven would have an idea what his byte budget was.

With trepidation I ran easy_exe's "build.bat" and waited, the screen filled with an incomprehensible array of instrument names, note values, velocities and so on. Blueberry's tool was ripping my song apart, atomizing it down to its bare elements. A moment later I saw the following:

Linking...

Uncompressed size of code:  1462
Uncompressed size of data: 34073

Holy cow, my heart was grinding along at triple digit BPMs. The uncompressed music, after going through Blueberrie's atomic music smasher was 34k! I think I may have passed out for a moment, for when consciousness resumed I remember that this was the uncompressed size. I still had to know the result of step 4 "compress":

Final file size: 7998

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