TRACKING HINTS
Not that I am the man who is trying to tell others how to work with
a tracker, but for me it was always a great help to get some addit-
ional information on the too often bad/not documented tracker pro-
grams. Especially shortcuts are pretty important for decent tracking
work, since the disorientating change between mouse and keyboard all
the time sucks energy :-)
Anyway, I hope this might make tracking more easy for the one or
other..
* * *
<-- FLEXTRAX 0.5 -->
In here are numerous shortcuts. Definatly the best-equiped tracker
regarding that. I won't list them all here now, just because the new
version 0.9 should be released soon and will feature a documentation!
Yeah! :-)
Anyway, just some small things you should take care of:
IF you use the mouse to mark a block be careful to not do it too
fast, because this might have two bad effects:
1. you could reach the quit-area (the part left-up of the screen)
2. you could wonder why you cannot paste a pattern. if you mark a
block very fast from left to right and the mouse reaches the right
border of the screen while the mousekey is pressed, the program
just pastes crap.
IF you load a module you just edited some time ago and the program
crashed while replaying the reason is as follows:
Editing a tune and forgetting to enter a samplenumber, such as
C-1 -- C30 is accepted by Flextrax once. If you load the same tune
again and replay it, Flextrax will crash there. So one can say it
is a must to enter samplenumbers, if you want to here the full tune
again.
UPDATE: Yeah, now FlexTrax 0.9 is out. Get it at newbeat.atari.org!
<-- PROTRACKER ST/e/F030 -->
Just some little things here I found quite useful:
Some Shortcuts: Ctrl-D open diskmenu
Ctrl-L load sample
Ctrl-M load module
Ctrl-1..9 set steprate! This shortcut was
given to me by Tinker/TNH at
EIL'99. I really missed that
function all the years! :-)
<-- SIDSOUND DESIGNER -->
Although the shortcuts are written down in the infoscreen I realized
that I just didn't know some of the following things anyway before:
Helpful shortcuts: COPYING
F1 cut track
F2 paste track
F3 cut pattern
F4 paste pattern
Shift+F1 mark block begin
Shift+F2 mark block end
Shift+F3 paste pattern
MISC.
Enter play pattern (info from Mc Laser/tSCc)
+ transpose track up
- transpose track down
Shift + volume in track plus one
Shift - volume in track minus one
/ instrument number back
* instrument number forward
< change palette
Other things: -> Using tones in the high octaves (7) is very
dangerous because the program then usually
crashes without the possibilty to save anymore.
So try to avoid using those high notes.
-> If you want to load a new song (*.tri) NEVER
press "abort" in the fileselector. Else the
current tune you are working on will be over-
written by a big crap file.
-> If you have done some senseless diskoperation
like saving on a full disk and SSD seems to be
crashed just keep cool. After a while the prg
will output a diskerror message. Then you can
press return and continue with a smile :-)
-> At Unconventional this summer I wondered why
mOdmate/Checkpoint is always clicking on the
infobutton after having loaded a file.
It was simply because the palette is fucked up
on Falcon if you use the diskoperations and when
you click on the infobutton and return to the
editor the palette is reset to standart.
Nice to know for ppl who are too lazy to search
and press the "<" key :-)
-> SSD drums are supposed to sound shitty. But you
can change their sound quite nicely anyway.
Either by editing the frequency/amplitude in the
soundeditor, or buy clicking on two buttons in
it. Those buttons are on the upper side of the
soundeditor screen (noise, tone efx). Just try
to play around with them a bit.
-> Another hint that was given to me by mOdmate
which I wouldn't have found out for sure is,
that in case you want to do musics with head-
phones and you cannot because the music is so
fucking loud, you can use the controlpanel to
decrease the volume (sound.cpx). Now you might
say "logical!" but after all, I just didn't
get this idea on my own, because I thought SSD
switches of everything else or so.. hmm.. :-)
Ok, that's all for the moment. Now just get back to your tracker and
work! Eehm.. and do not forget to save regulary, of course :-)
Have fun.
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