Short: (Octa)MED player, MUI interface Author: Stephen Williams (sw@nysa.u-net.com) Uploader: Stephen Williams (sw nysa u-net com) Type: mus/play Requires: MUI 3.8, OS2.x+ Architecture: m68k-amigaos Swomp 1.0, (c) 1998 Stephen Williams ==================================== I've had this program sitting around for about three months and not got around to releasing it. Big Stuff has happened to me recently (i.e. moving house, starting a new job etc), so I never got around to writing a .guide for it. I still haven't, so I thought I'd knock a .readme together that details the function and operation of this program, and get it put on to Aminet. I spent Copious Hours on Swomp and don't want my time to be wasted. Swomp (contraction of "Stephen Williams' OctaMED Player") is a little proggy I wrote because I wasn't happy with any of the OctaMED player programs around. Specifically, I wanted something a lot like Teijo Kinnunen's player, but with a nicer GUI and savable preferences. Invocation ---------- Swomp can be started in the usual ways (double-click the icon, or click Swomp and shift-click the module, or make Swomp the module's Default Tool, or use the Shell, with or without the name of a mod as an argument). If present, Swomp will utilize Georg Hoermann's xfdmaster.library (v36+) to allow the use of crunched modules. Since xfdmaster.library automatically hooks into XPK if available, you can use an optimized sample cruncher like xpkSQSH to compress all your modules. Swomp requires version 7 or above of medplayer.library, octaplayer.library and octamixplayer.library to be installed in LIBS:, which are supplied in this distribution. In addition, you must have MUI 3.8 installed. You can get MUI from Aminet. Operation --------- Once loaded, Swomp will display it's GUI. The window contains six elements: 1/ "Module" string gadget: here you type the name of a module you wish to load and play. There's a popup button to the right of the string gadget, you can click this to pop up an ASL file selector and select your chosen module that way. A module starts playing as soon as it is loaded. 2/ "Subsong" slider: if the module contains more than one song, you can select the song you wish to play using this. 3/ "Play/Pause" button; this acts like the corresponding button on a CD player. Press it to suspend playback, or resume a paused module. 4/ "Stop" button; when clicked, this halts playback. The module will begin again from the start when you click "Play". 5/ Timer: this shows how long the current module has been playing for. 6/ Channel usage: this shows how many sound channels the current song is using. The figure will be between 4 and 8, or "Mix" for OctaMED Soundstudio modules. Menus ----- Swomp has two menus, "Project" and "Settings". The items on the Project menu are as follows: Load Module...: Opens an ASL selector so you can pick a module to load. Play/Pause: Same as clicking the "Play/Pause" button. Stop: Same as clicking the "Stop" button. Annotation...: Displays any annotation text included in the currently loaded module. About...: Gee, I wonder what this does :-) Quit: Hoses the current instance of Swomp. The items on the Settins menu are these: Swomp: Opens Swomps prefs window (see below). MUI: Launches MUI prefs to allow tweaking of Swomp's GUI. The preferences window ---------------------- This window has four items: 1/ High-Quality Mode: If checked, this option enabled high-quality playback mode for 5-8 channel modules. Defaults to "off". 2/ Mixing Frequency: This pop-up slider allows you to select the playback rate for OctaMED Soundstudio mods. The default is 15,000Hz, Note that high settings may require the use of double-scanned screenmodes. 3/ 14-Bit Mode: If checked, this option enables 14-bit mixing when playing OctaMED Soundstudio mods. 4/ Save: This saves the settings in ENVARC: for Swomp to pick up next time it's invoked. If you don't save, the settings will persist only for the current invocation of Swomp. Settings take effect as soon as you make an adjustment. Credits ------- Whilst this is one of my better programs, the real quality coding was done by Teijo Kinnunen, who developed MED, OctaMED and OctaMED Soundstudio, and who was good enough to package the replay code in libraries, free for non-commercial use. Thanks, Teijo! Credit is due to Stefan Stuntz for the MUI system, without which Swomp would have had a less nice GUI. Nice one, Stefan! The Amiga community owes you a great debt of gratitude for MUI. Georg Hoermann deserves credit for the xfdmaster decompression system, which Swomp utilizes to support crunched modules. Great job, Georg! Outroduction ------------ Sorry that these aren't proper .guide docs, but they should suffice. If you have any comments on Swomp, please email me at the address at the top of this document. Oh, and be sure to give my Web page a look (http://www.nysa.u-net.com/), you can find more little Amiga proglets by me at my site.