Thursday, January 14, 2010
Greetings,
Happy New Year to you. I hope you've had some cozy holidays. Here is the first newsletter of 2010.
Track release: Metal Flowers
As you know, I enjoy composing music that is usable for games on various platforms. I also like researching and experimenting with various methods to insert music into games.
Then about a month ago I discovered a music format called the Mobile eXtensible Music File format (mXMF), invented all the way back in 2001 by The MIDI Manufacturers Association and Beatnik. The description of the format sounded so fantastic, it was difficult for me to understand why noone has used it before. In short, the mXMF file is a kind of container for a MIDI file and a DLS file (DownLoadable Sounds), giving a playback similar to that of a module (MOD/XM/S3M/IT). But best part is that it is supported on all newer cellphones! Playing modules on a mobile phone using JavaME has been discussed many times by JavaME developers, because it would be great to be able to do that.
So for the past month I've been researching and experimenting with this format, in the hope that I could create better quality music for JavaME. I got a lot of knowledge about the format in that time. Read this thread for a full documentation of my research.
One of the (sad) things I learned was, that Sony Ericsson phones have a 30kb limit for the soundbank. So if I wanted to have my SE Aino playback an XM file (after converting it to mXMF ofcourse), I would have to use max 30kb of samples.
My attempt in creating an XM file with a soundbank of max 30kb resulted in Metal Flowers; a 144kb 16bit XM, converted to a 49kb 8bit mXMF file containing a 24kb soundbank (DLS file) and a 25kb sound-data (MIDI file). If you'd like to try playback on your cellphone, go to Metal Flowers at IndieGameMusic.com and download the mXMF file. If you have a newer phone, it should play using built-in players. No need for any additional software.
A 30kb limit for samples is really low. On top of that, Sony Ericsson phones have a bug that prevents using a custom percussion-map. But I'm not sure I'm done experimenting with the format just yet anyway. We'll see. :-)
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