The Sinclair QL Forum

Is there any QL soundcard (AY, DAC or FM) and music tracker for it???

Matej wrote:Is there any QL soundcard (AY, DAC or FM) and music tracker for it???

The QL is one of the very few computers that's never had a music tracker (so: About time someone would produce one.... - which is a bit difficult without the proper hardware)

Very early in the QL's history, there was at least one AY sound card available: QSound from ABC Elektronik in Germany (I don't think a huge amount of them were sold).

Some QL compatibles and emulators, namely QPC2, SMSQMulator, Q40/Q60 and Q68 support Stereo DAC sound, but, to my knowledge, no Tracker/Modplayer is available.

Hi,

I had a damaged QSound card as mentioned above, I was going to repair the PCB, as some tracks were damaged and the through plating missing on some through holes.

But a friend in Germany wanted to make more, so I sent it for an aid to reconstruct s sound card for QL. Nothing ever came of this...

In early 90s I started to play with the primitive DRTtacker for DOS... 4 tracks only, 8 KHz sampling rate. Then arrived the legendary FASTTRACKER2: what a piece of software! I still listen to some MODs I created, occasionally.

In the future some platforms will get AY support (QPC for sure, and there is experimental support for Q68, too). I'm just not 100% sure about how to design the software API yet, maybe I will try to make it somewhat QSound compatible at the low level. But that is for a time when I've got a lot more spare time, if that'll ever happen.
Streaming music is then possible and works very well already, but there is still no tracker software and probably never will be.

Music Tracker? Is that something that remembers who has borrowed your CDs?

Asking for a "friend".

Cheers,
Norm.

There was a MIDI interface that Miracle did. Al Boehm of NESQLUG wrote some articles about it for QL Today. Looking on Dilwyn's page, there is a tracker package written for that MIDI interface by Dan Gaffey. There is even a download for the source code. Not sure how easy it would be to convert the tracker software to use something other than the MIDI interface. The Tracker is written in a combination of assembly and SuperBasic.

Tim

swensont wrote:There was a MIDI interface that Miracle did. Al Boehm of NESQLUG wrote some articles about it for QL Today. Looking on Dilwyn's page, there is a tracker package written for that MIDI interface by Dan Gaffey. There is even a download for the source code. Not sure how easy it would be to convert the tracker software to use something other than the MIDI interface. The Tracker is written in a combination of assembly and SuperBasic.

I fear, the Tracker software is very hardware dependent to the Miracle MIDI hardware. As there is no manual from Miracle themselves on Dilwyn's site, I do not know, if they ever had published the way to use the MIDI whithout the original Tracker software.

I'm afraid what Matej is looking for is not software for a no longer existing QL MIDI interface, but rather an Amiga MOD-player (which is pretty much a different beast) that allows to re-play .MOD files on a sound card. Common terminology has changed slightly here over time.

Tobias

swensont wrote:There was a MIDI interface that Miracle did. Al Boehm of NESQLUG wrote some articles about it for QL Today. Looking on Dilwyn's page, there is a tracker package written for that MIDI interface by Dan Gaffey. There is even a download for the source code. Not sure how easy it would be to convert the tracker software to use something other than the MIDI interface. The Tracker is written in a combination of assembly and SuperBasic.

Tim

I used to edit the newsletter for NESQLUG (now the name has bee usurped by SQL folks in NE). I remember having a good number of folks meeting (I believe) at Al's house pretty regularly back in the late 90's. I lost touch when I went back to school to get my PhD. Wonder where they are now...