so i've gotten sucked back into audio stuff a bit lately. here's what happened...

at the beginning of the month i was playing around with some graphics stuff for a demo and realized i could fit it into 4k with some tricks, so i spent time that weekend coding it up. after a bunch of optimization i got it down to around 3kb so it seemed i would finally have space for some audio! (you can see a couple fun 4ks i did here and here but i couldn't fit any music in them)

figuring out what to do for the sound is tough. i burned a bunch of my free time in 2004 doing synths and what not (though i found i enjoyed coding the ui's for them much more than the audio!) so i didn't want to get bogged down doing a ton of audio stuff again. anyways after some exploring and soul searching i determined the quickest thing to do would be to hack apart an old MOD player i did in that dark period of 2004 and now try out the trick of stealing audio samples from the windows gm.dls file.

so the next weekend was spent researching and learning about the gm.dls and creating code to snag samples from it and all that, then a weekend of hacking up my old MOD code and remembering how audio works :P, and finally a weekend of optimizing the player and doing a tool to strip MOD files down into a friendly and compressible format for the 4k.

phew! so i think i'm out of the audio woods again and can focus on finishing the graphics and animation. i think now MOD isn't the best way to go and i should really be using MIDI and a VST plugin but 1) all the tools i tried that with before i had to get uhh "trial" versions of and they were very complicated and took up gigabytes of my precious disk space and 2) this audio stuff has me ready to put a pencil through my eye so for at least this 4k i think i'll just run with this method!