SNES Game Sound System

About

The sole purpose of this software is to make music and sound effects for SNES homebrew games. It is not meant to be a stand-alone music authoring software in any way.

The editor works in semi-interactive mode. This means that the result of any changes (even mute controls) will only be heard after restarting the song, you can't hear the changes immediately. It is supposed that during editing the song is mostly played using the Enter key (play from current position).

The system architecture uses a single sample bank for every song and sound effect in a game. The sound driver along with sample bank is fully loaded at start up. Sound effects created as shorter songs (marked as sound effect), they also loaded along with the driver. Larger songs are loaded on a one-by-one basis. It is kind of MIDI concept, music files only contain notes and commands, while sound bank contains the actual sounds used by the music files.

It is supposed that WAV samples are resampled and looped in an external audio editor, Wavosaur or similar. The samples should be 16 bit mono, sampled at 8000, 16000, or 32000 Hz (the latter is preferable), with melodic content preferably tuned to B (of any octave) +21 cent. In other words, change pitch of a C-tuned sample 79 cents down. The reason behind this is the BRR encoding that works with 16 sample blocks, with this tuning a simple waveform will be a multiple of 16, improving looping quality. Pitch table is calculated to map the B +21 sampled instrument to actual C note on the C key, producing the standard tuning. To play a sample close to its original sample rate, use B key.

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