Alternative ORG Editor

I like Orgmaker. I'm apparently the only one around here who does. But I digress.

Out of boredom and a passing interest in all things musical, I decided to take on making an alternative Org editor. I'm not even in an alpha stage. In fact, all I do have is DX8 DirectSound working and being able to create the whole spectrum with it, but I'm already looking for help.

Basically what I need is one of two things:

Samples of the sounds used in ORGMaker, or, more efficiently,
Data I can use to construct an identical wave.

The second one I mention because I remember someone saying that they knew of a set of Pxtone instruments that were the same as the ones used in CS - and as far as I've seen through limited poking through the program, Pxtone lets you construct the wave yourself, meaning it would be the data I need.

I mainly do this to practice programming things besides half-assed game demos, but also becuase OrgMaker, while really cool, is far from being intuitive or very user-friendly. If it gets off the ground (something which I make no promises of ) I'd like for it to get more people motivated about making Orgs for their games.

Oh, and if anyone cares, feel free to play with my preliminary 5-minute program.

 

He! I made also Sum orgs! Converted them from MIDI2ORG, but noone seems to be noticed -.-
Orgasm? Well thats a nice title ROFLMAO

 

I've finally given in and am going to try and record the instruments myself and then chop em into usable samples. Ah well. Such is life.

 

Hrm, I don't think the samples are stored directly with the rest of the sounds (though some drums... well, drum-like tones anyhow are stored in the same block sounds are.) I could try to look into this this weekend, if you're still interested, but I can't guarantee anything since I'll be away part of the weekend.

 

It's too late anyway, I already started last night and got 25 out of 99 samples of the different instruments done and split, with the rest of them lying in some wav files waiting to be split apart. It didn't take long, I just got distracted by FFX. Damn you, completionist nature and Celestial weapons!

Yay for Audacity!

 

Earlier today I got a little piano thing working, such that it had a simple program-generated sine wave playing a full octave (And the way I coded the frequency functions, any note from any octave), and then promptly played FFX for the rest of the day (keep in mind I woke up at noon, so bleh ). I had stopped because I had hit a wall with changing the frequency of wav samples.

Well I've fixed it and now have a little wav-player thing.

http://star.walagata.com/w/osmose/ORGasm.rar

It'll load any wav and play it on the middle octave. I've included the 25 samples that I ripped from ORGMaker last night just for testing purposes. Now that I can actually manipulate WAV's I'm going to clean up the horribly messy code and start work on the piano roll interface.

I'm not exactly sure if CS or ORGMaker can handle two notes at the same time on the same channel... sometime tomorrow I'll test it in ORGMaker, and if it passes, could someone here smack it into CS to see if it works there too?

 

Oh well, I still like the name
Nice player Ohhu Piano Well are you going to make it a bit ORGMAKER like in the future? I hate Piano players because I'am very bad on it ^^" For me the ORGMAKER Interface is much easier

 

Oh well, I still like the name
Nice player Ohhu Piano Well are you going to make it a bit ORGMAKER like in the future? I hate Piano players because I'am very bad on it ^^" For me the ORGMAKER Interface is much easier

Yeah, that's what I meant by "Piano Roll". ORGMaker has a Piano Roll interface, where you can see the notes in progression. The only other common way to lay notes in a music-editing program is like a sheet of music, which I'm bad at reading and don't like anyway.

One of the things motivating me in making this is the way the piano roll works. With ORGMaker you had to click a bunch of times to lay a note. I'm hoping to implement a way to "stretch" notes by dragging them, as well as having it remember the length of your last note so that when you lay a new one it's just as long - a lot of my inspiration comes from FL Studio.

I'm going to test multiple notes real quick now...

Yeah, ORGMaker can't handle two notes on the same channel at the same time. Boo. I'll have to account for that when making the editor. Ah well.

 

I'm sure no one is going to object me making progress posts every so often to vent frustration.

Course it isn't my fault that VB6 is horrible with handling dynamic arrays. Okay, so it's a little much asking to have dynamic arrays with a custom object class, but still.

I should make a list of what I want to be implemented in what I'd consider as a version 0.5. I'm sure I could number it much more conservatively, but my idea of 0.5 is basically functional without being able to open or save files, as well as a few little extra features like selecting notes and moving them as a group or cutting and pasting.

-Piano roll environment
-Being able to drag note lengths
-Playback of all notes & channels(I have yet to get around to playing two WAVs at once, but this should be handled easily by DirectX.)
-8 channels of instruments (drums are a no no right now because I've only got 25 instruments ripped right now anyway, and since getting the drums done is just a copy of the instruments, it ties in with this)
-Editable volume and panning for each note

So far I have it drawing the piano roll and telling me where on the roll I clicked (in terms of beat, not simply X and Y of mouse), as well as playing back single WAVs in different notes.

The problem I'm at right now is drawing and storing notes. Originally I tried using an array of "note" objects, where it would redimension the array to make room for a new note (I'll handle overlapping notes or adding notes to the middle later). VB was having trouble finding info on the notes as well as redimensioning the array. Then I tried to make a custom object that would act as the piano roll and contain the note objects, but that ran into the same problems. I was going to settle with a 2-dimensional array, but it was still whining about dynamic arrays, so I'm going to have to do a little more research on what the hell is going wrong with them.

My goal for today is to be able to draw single-beat notes by clicking. Once I've got that I have some college stuff to work on, and if I finish that and my homework, I'll get back and start working on note stretching.

EDIT: Fear, for I have conquored note drawing on this day. >=D

 

Here's a zip of ORG instrument samples, in WAV format, that I found on PisColla a while back:

http://one.xthost.info/Snarwin/pxvoice_organya.zip

 

I appreciate the effort, but those are the same WAVs that Shining Phantom gave me. For some reason, they import into PXTone perfectly fine, but any other audio program, including Winamp and Audacity, don't recognize them. I've already got a group of WAV files with all the instruments anyway, I just have only split one of them and have about 25 out of 99 instruments done, although thankfully the drum files work fine from that zip.

Thanks for trying though.

 

I wrote some Python code which, AFAIK, correctly read the .org files. If you want, you can make use of it (the midi conversion code doesn't really work, though).

You can check it out at http://devan.infogami.com

 

I dunno if I can get Python to interact with Visual Basic 6, but it's still cool nonetheless.

Part of my motivation for this project, though, is to learn more about VB, and one of those things I need to learn is how to deal with files at a hexadecimal level. I do think it's amazing someone besides me even cares about ORGs though.

Right now I'm having trouble with DirectSound. Mainly the fact that I do not know how to stretch a sample seamlessly (Right now it can play the WAV over and over again at whatever note I need, but it sounds skippy like that.) and there's little to no advanced info on DirectX8 Sound. The best I've gotten is the SDK and help files, but they're all for C++. Ah well. I'll just have to wrestle with it until I get it working.

It's either work on this or work on being able to put notes on the roll and stretching them.

One question: How should I handle what happens when I stretch one note into another? ORGMaker simply deletes any notes getting in the way - should I do the same? Or should I just have it make the other note smaller?

 

Screenshot For The Win

I've had basically what you see there for the past couple of days, sans the stretched notes - those were added in today. Right now I'm having difficulty on manipulating the notes - I'm not really stuck, I just haven't had enough time to tackle a few things yet. Mainly because for a while today I was stuck on how to order the notes (In the array that stores each note, at least) by position, as my method was not working, and only got that partially solved around 9:00 PM. It's 10:00, I have school tomorrow (Two tests, graduation cap and gown fitting, as well as the final Computer Club meeting before our Halo tournament next week - being president is both awesome and nerve-racking at once).

However, my hopes are still high for getting a working version out within a year. I go by the little goals, and my biggest goal right now is getting the UI working perfectly. Then I can go back to banging my head against the table wondering why no one has any helpful documentation on DirectMusic.

Oh yeah, one of the nifty little features you don't see in the screenshot is how it deletes notes when you lay down new ones. Again, it's not perfected, but it's progress.

PS: I hope you all like the icon, by the way. I figured that since Sue and Misery both had their spots as CS utility icons, Balrog needed his.

 

Nice looks like the old one

 

Makes sense - I jacked some ORGMaker graphics because the ones I was trying to come up with sucked. I'm open to any better-looking ideas if someone want to cook them up while I continue wrestling with bugs that weren't there this morning.

 

Skin File?

Makes sense - I jacked some ORGMaker graphics because the ones I was trying to come up with sucked. I'm open to any better-looking ideas if someone want to cook them up while I continue wrestling with bugs that weren't there this morning.

Maybe u could make a Skin file who includes the graphics so everyone can change and upload their skins

 

Maybe, although it wouldn't get priority over, y'know, getting the program to work.

 

LIMITED FILE WRITING YAY

Now to just work on those 15 thousand other bugs. But progress has been made!

 

LOOOOOL Congrats.

Edit: I'am awaiting it with SOOO MUCH Eagerness!!!!