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Member
Posts: 19
| A quick forum search shows that this has been asked in the past on here, but has there been any strides with the issue of exporting or converting songs from Revisit into XM or MOD? I have a project I would like to do where I develop a track using Revisit, building up other non tracked tracks up around it, but then export as a tracker module for playback on a video game console by importing the mod into the tracker for that system.
As a lesser but more general concern it would also make me feel more comfortable about using Revisit as a general tracker since your song isn't "stuck" inside it. |
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Expert
Posts: 512
Location: Netherlands | In the past, the lack of a tempo command (and all tempo changes being done in the host) would render reViSiT quite useless for standalone usage, methinks. With the recent tempo command (@) it would be more easy to export things, I think. In a way, as the whole song is stored in XML, a smart coder could make his own converter. But alas.. who's to do that?  |
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Member
Posts: 19
| You would think, because Revisit can import tracker formats, it wouldn't be too difficult to export them as well. Unfortunately I don't think enough people use revisit yet to hope that a user comes along who is also a programmer who has enough free time to develop such a conversion tool. |
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Expert
Posts: 512
Location: Netherlands | Exporting is probably no biggie, but I estimate that Chris' goals aren't so much to support stone age formats, but to have a tracker within a professional studio environment. Could be wrong though.. |
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Member
Posts: 19
| True, but many trackers are being developed today that support these formats, it's the closest thing that we have to a "standard", even though it's old. GIF is still widely used because of it's acceptance even though it's a very old format that can only have 256 colours.
In my case I want to design the track using revisit, and then import it into VGM Music Maker a tracker that was programmed a couple of years ago for the SEGA genesis. It supports to MOD format. Even if Revisit didn't export that exact format, using OpenMPT I could convert it into MOD from one of the other formats. XM probably comes the closest to supporting all of Revisit's features. I guess what would be really good would be if OpenMPT would add support for Revisit modules, but as I said before, I don't think it is recognized enough yet for someone to take the time to do so. |
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Expert
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Location: Netherlands | It may be a niche all-right, but a third party coder wouldn't have to dive into format descriptions with offsets 'n all kinda hex crap and binary flags (did you ever see the IT2 file format? :P), it's just plain XML. I'd say it'd be peanuts for those OpenMPT people to support the reViSiT format.
Ahwell it's not my call anyway.. I want the upcoming version, that's what I want! ^^ |
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Developer
Posts: 746
 
Location: England | Legacy formats are a bit of a quandary.
Historically, reViSiT was a plugin designed to extend a sequencer. It didn't have tempo controls, and it was built to export audio to the sequencer, rather than interchange with other programs. At the same time, reViSiT's file format was explicitly designed to be open and easy for other developers to support, if they wanted to. Since reViSiT can now be used standalone and includes tempo support, there's more of an argument for file interchange with other programs.
Technologically, it's much easier for reViSiT to load older formats than to export to them. reViSiT can do practically everything those old programs can do, but it's not the same the other way round - any export will be far from complete or perfect. For example, IT allowed you to specify either a volume or a panning entry for a note cell, but reViSiT allows both at once, so which should the exporter throw away if a user does use both? It gets much worse for the other formats. Also, from a practical point of view, much of the documentation about older file formats is also oriented towards loading such files, rather than saving. Potentially, I could target one of the newer, more capable tracker file formats, such as OpenMPT or Renoise, which users could then convert to IT, XM, S3M, or MOD in those programs. These newer programs have more recently started using formats similar to reViSiT's, which makes them easier to decipher in the absence of sufficient documentation.
Ultimately, it's still a lot of work that will sap time from developing other, more "forward-looking" parts of reViSiT. I'm not saying it'll never happen, only that it's not currently a top priority.
Hope this helps,
Chris
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Member
Posts: 19
| Makes sense, and I understand you have lots of exciting features planned. I also hadn't noticed that OpenMPT used it's own format now, that's interesting. Exporting other modules is definitely a "would be nice to have" feature rather than something absolutely critical.
Edited by jamesh 2013-09-12 10:46 AM
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Revisit format to XM/MOD ?
