Music for the NES can be created by FamiTracker. But what is the equivalent if you want to create sound effects?
FamiTone works differently for music and sound effects: Music is created from a FamiTracker text export. Sound effects are created directly from an NSF file.
So, I assume you cannot really use FamiTracker to do stuff like explosions or something like that.
Therefore what is the best tool to create different sound effects that can then be converted into a single NSF file?
DRW wrote:
So, I assume you cannot really use FamiTracker to do stuff like explosions or something like that.
Why not? You can export as NSF from FamiTracker.
But why are sound effects handled differently in FamiTone?
I mean, in this case, I could compile the sound effect the same way I would compile a regular song.
Why is there a difference in FamiTone between songs and sound effects if the same program (FamiTracker) is used to create both?
Probably because it's more RAM-efficient to represent sound effects differently. If you're playing one song and two sound effects, you don't want three complete musical contexts running at once.
The difference isn't Famitracker.
The difference is in Famitone.
(In my opinion)... Famitone2 was designed and refined to take up as few bytes of memory as possible (and run as quickly as possible)*, and some compromises were made to remove several features... and (I think) Shiru wanted to allow every possible Famitracker effect for sound effects, which usually DON'T take up alot of ROM space, so he used the NSF format.
(EDITED)
* The famitone2 sound engine uses only 5% of the logic time. (I overestimated it earlier).
I suppose you could write each sound effect as a unique 'song' for Famitone2, and skip the NSF step completely, but you'd have to think of a way to keep the main song from jumping back to the start.
GGSound provides music and sound effects right out of the box. Just prefix your famitracker song with sfx_ and the GGSound text-to-asm converter turns it into a sound effect.
In
Pently, my own music engine, sound effects are more similar to FamiTracker instruments than to songs. But I don't yet have an automated way to transcribe FamiTracker music into Pently format; it's currently more like MML or LilyPond.
O.k., thanks for the information. I'll tell my composer to do the sound effects in FamiTracker then.