Options for Playing XM/Mod?

What are my options if I want to play Mods ( specifically XM's ) in BlitzMax?

1) I've written a wrapper for MikMod and the mods play but MikMod's playback is hideous. Loud and raucous and not at all like they sound when played in XMPlay or even WinAmp. So this is out.

2) FMod and Bass. I'm currently using Bass, but haven't bought a license yet. I will if I don't find anything better. I see no advantage to FMod and the license is slightly less appealing than Bass, so I'll take Bass over that.

Anything else? I don't need 3d postional audio, special effects and all that malarkey. I just need the ability to start a mod, pause a mod, stop a mod, change the volume, and that's about it. But the audio quality needs to be top notch. None of this low quality tinny, jarring noise that MikWin was banging out.

You missed MaxMod although I think it has only partial .xm support at the moment.

Yep, it seems not to like either of the .xm's I have, as it crashes when attempting to play either. Thanks though, that was definitely worth a shot before buying Bass.

hmm I wrapped mikmod and didnt notice any major distortions, I also helped out with maxmod, and one thing is for sure you will never find any players sounding exactly the same.
For instance both winamp and madtracker sound pants, it sounds like they just use simple averageing for mixing not addition, which means a single channel on its own will sound way to quiet...

mikmod has extensive params to tweak and is the one that sounds closest to my old Amiga.

not surprised, version 1.5 only comes with the protracker mod, you'll have to wait for 1.6 for xm support.
(might upload an alpha version soon, as its sounding quite good now)

Yes, I'm aware they all have their quirks, but MikWin is miles off. XMPlay sounds almost identical to Bass and I don't believe it's actually using Bass. MikWin is massively different, raucous and tinny and just horrible. Might be just fine with other mods, but not with either of these.


Well Winamp is about halfway between MikWin and Bass on these. It's pretty bad, but nowhere near as bad as MikWin.


That would indeed explain it. Bass it is then, I guess.

Or you could hang in there until 1.6 is released and give it a try? I mean, hey, you can't beat the price! ;)

Thanks to Papa and Chris for their contribution(s) in this regard.

Russell

p.s. This page seems to be a good source of module information:
http://pipin.tmd.ns.ac.yu/extra/fileformat/modules/index.htm

Well the game is all-but finished. All it needs now is nag screens, Software Passport integration and testing/bug fixes. If there was something now to save me $100, great, but I wouldn't want to delay release to wait for something which might not be as good as bass, and I end up buying Bass anyway. Bass is good value for $100, I think, considering that's unlimited products.

If XM only, try uFMOD

http://ufmod.sourceforge.net/

I's based on miniFMOD source and supports DSound, the quick and dirty way is compiled it as a DLL in PB then it can be called under Win32, trying to tweaking it to make it GCC friendly, and currently there's no Mac support.

What about the modplug dll?

I didnt try MikWin, mikmak does differ...
[edit] you might be better compiling from source and choosing carefully what driver it should use!!

ModPlug is a little lower quality than Bass, but close. Problem is.. a search on the ModPlug dll turned up a few threads complaining that it's not particularly compatible, so that's probably not a good move.

Will take a look a uFMod later. Not sure if I wanna mess around compiling MikMak from source, but I'll see how much time I have later.

Shame about modplug. I got it working in Blitz but couldn't turn off the embedded equaliser! The quality was much better than BlitzPlus though as ModPlug volume ramps down on note off whereas BlitzPlus just cuts, which results in horrid pops.

Er, yes we could!

Cool! I forgot about that last bit :-)