Introduction to Computer Music What is a MOD-file? For a description of WAV or MIDI files, click here. What I refer to as a MOD-file includes many file types with extensions such as MOD, XM, S3M, MTM, as well as many others. I refer to all these various formats as a MOD-file because the MOD format was the original, and all the other formats are pretty much the same concept, but have various enhancements and improvements. MOD-files follow the basic formula: Real Recordings of Instruments + Information on How to Play the Instruments = Great Music The instruments in a MOD are actual recordings in .WAV format embedded into the file itself. The sheet music is a set of commands which tell the computer such information as when to play a note, at what pitch, volume, panning, effect,...and the list goes on. This concept is similar to a MIDI file, but MIDI does not contain its own samples. Thus, a MOD-file can be thought of as a combination of a WAV and MIDI file. The advantage is that they are much smaller than WAV files for their playing time, and sound much better than MIDI because the composer can use instruments which are more suited to the style of each individual song. How do I play a MOD-file? There are many MOD-players available, but Cubic Player is the best DOS player. I hear it will also work under Windows 3.1 / 95 and OS/2. If you want a Windows-specific MOD player, try MOD4WIN, which can be found at the MAZ Sound Tools Page. Be forewarned, however, that this particular player will stop working after 30 days if you don't pay for it. How do I set up Cubic Player to play a MOD? First of all, download all the files you need to run Cubic, create a new directory, and un-zip all the files into this directory. At the DOS-prompt, start Cubic by typing cp If you get an error message saying that DOS4GW couldn't be loaded, make sure that this file is in your directory also. Cubic should start fine even if you don't edit your CP.INI file, but it will be a little slower loading. After starting Cubic, you will find yourself in the fileselector. Use the arrow keys to change directories and select the files you wish to play. To play the highlighted file immediately, press Enter. How do I get the best playback quality in Cubic Player? If you have a wavetable card: (GUS or AWE) If you have a wavetable card, there is generally very little you can do to increase your sound quality. However, you may wish to take note of the following points: 1) Cubic will use your wavetable memory to load the instruments. If you don't have enough memory to load the samples, Cubic will decrease the quality of the samples until they fit. This is called sample crunching or memory multiplying. To see what samples are crunched, go into instruments mode and press i until you see a list of the names of the instruments with sample information next to each name. Find the column which says bit This is the bit depth of the sample. A fraction or exclamation point next to it indicates that the sample is crunched. A crunched sample doesn't sound nearly as good as the original. If you have many crunched samples, you may wish to play the sample back using the software mixer instead of using the wavetable part of your card (if you have a GUS, download the Player Device on the previous page.) See below for optimizing the software mixer. 2) In the fileselector, press Alt-b to tag a file for playing with a different device (software mixer) 3) The AWE supports only 16-bit samples. Therefore, Cubic converts all 8-bit samples up to 16 bits when it copys the instruments into your AWE's RAM. This means that the samples take up twice as much memory as it seems they should. In other words, a 300k MOD which uses only 8-bit samples may not fit into 512k memory without crunching, becuase it will take up 600k of memory when the samples are converted to 16-bit. 4) If you have an AWE, press Alt-F4 to toggle the view from panning / balance to reverb / chorus. Use Ctrl-F5 and Ctrl-F6 to increase / decrease reverb, and Ctrl-F7 and Ctrl-F8 to increase / decrease chorus. 5) If you have a GUS, edit your CP.INI file to change your number of MIDI output channels. More means more simultaneous notes, less means a higher sample rate. You will have to experiment until you reach the best value for your tastes. 6) The high-quality mixer actually sounds better than the hardware mixing of the GUS or AWE, but it requires a lot of CPU time (and you don't get the AWE's reverb or chorus.) If you have a fast enough CPU (Pentium-120 or faster), you may wish to use the mixer instead. Now works with GUS also. If you don't have a wavetable card: (or don't know) Optimizing Cubic's software mixer for a particular computer can be a bit tricky. You want to get the best sound quality for each individual file, but you may not have enough CPU power to play the more intense MOD's at the highest quality. Try each of the following for your MOD's; if you don't have enough CPU power, go to the next one down on the list. I hear that a Pentium-120 can handle #1 at 32 channels. My Pentium-60 can handle #1 at 13 channels, #2 at 16 channel, and #3 at 32 channels. 1) High quality mixer, FOI, surround 2) High quality mixer, AOI, surround 3) Low quality mixer, FOI, surround 4) Low quality mixer, AOI, surround 5) Low quality mixer, AOI 6) Low quality mixer, FFI 7) Low quality mixer, digital filter (1/4, 1/2,...) 8) Low quality mixer, 8-bit, mono, lower sampling rate To select the high or low quality mixer: press f to go into the fileselector. Scroll down until you get to drive @: Select this drive and go into the directory devices. Select the high-quality or low-quality mixer by highlighting them and pressing Enter. (You can also add them to your playlist) To select / deselect surround sound, press F4. At the top of the screen, o means disabled, x means enabled. To select FOI or AOI, press Backspace. To select FFI, press Alt-Backspace To select a digital filter, press Ctrl-Bakcspace To use 8-bit output or decrease your sample rate, edit your CP.INI What specific changes should I make to CP.INI? Be sure to make a backup of the original before proceeding. 1) If you want MIDI playback, under [general], change the guspatchpath to the directory where the UltraSound patches are located. 2) (optional) If your pictures or animations won't load, under [general] change your datapath= to be the directory where your animation and picture files are located. 3) Under [sound], find the line which says playerdevices= and delete the devices which you don't have. 1) If you have a SoundBlaster, delete devpWSS and devpPAS 2) If you have an Ultrasound, delete devpSB, devpWSS, and devpPAS 3) If you have a Windows Sound System card, delete devpSB and devpPAS 4) If you have a ProAudio Spectrum, delete devpSB and devpWSS 5) Don't delete devpNone or devpDisk 4) Under [sound], find the line which says samplerdevices= and delete the devices which you don't have. 1) If you have a SoundBlaster, delete devsGUS and devsWSS 2) If you have an Ultrasound, delete devsSB and devsWSS 3) If you have a Windows Sound System card, delete devsSB and devsPAS 4) If you have a ProAudio Spectrum, delete devsSB and devsWSS 5) Don't delete devsNone 5) Under [sound], find the line which says wavetabledevices= and delete the devices which you don't have. 1) If you have an AWE, delete devwGUS 2) If you have an Ultrasound, delete devwAWE 3) If you have a Windows Sound System or ProAudio Spectrum, delete devwGUS and devwAWE 5) Don't delete devwMix or devwMixQ 6) Under [sound], change the rate32=48000 to rate32=44100 I don't know why the default is this value, most cards can't handle it. 7) Under [sound], change midichan=24 to fit your preferences. If you don't have a GUS, I recommend midichan=32 8) Under [sound], you can change bigmodules=devwMix to bigmodules=devwMixQ if you have a fast CPU. This is the wavetable device which will be used to play modules marked with Alt-b in the fileselector. If you don't have a wavetable card, try keeping the default value and using devwMixQ as your default mixer. You can then tag modules with too many channels in the fileselector to play with devwMix. (by the way, devwMix is the regular mixer and devwMixQ is the high-quality mixer) 9) If you prefer, change surround=off to surround=on 10) If you prefer, change filter=6 to filter=7 11) Under [fileselector], change the playonce, randomplay, and loop parameters if you so desire. These can also be configured in the fileselector itself by pressing Alt-c. playonce=on will remove modules from the playlist after playing, randomplay=off will play modules in the order they were added to the playlist, and loop=off will play each module only once before going to the next module. 12) Under [fileselector], change path=. to the path that your MOD files are located. This will start the fileselector in the directory you specified. (Potential to save lots of time here...) 13) If you wish, you may also delete the configuration sections for those devices which you deleted in steps 3-5. How do I play MIDI files in Cubic? First of all, Cubic's MIDI playback uses the Gravis UltraSound patches to play the MIDI files. If you have an UltraSound, this is nothing special; but if you don't have one, then this is pretty important. For one thing, most soundcards use some form of an FM synthesizer to play MIDI files, which sounds pretty horrible. Cubic treats the MIDI file as it would a MOD file, but it uses the UltraSound patches as instruments because a MIDI file doesn't contain waveforms which can be treated as instruments. This sounds much more realistic because the instruments actually sound real. The first thing you must do is to obtain the UltraSound patches and follow the instructions on the previous page for installation. Put all of the .pat files along with default.cfg into a separate directory, and follow step #1 (above) to modify your CP.IN file. Then you can start Cubic in the usual way, select a MIDI file, and start jamming!