I composed a little something on Atari ST

607 · June 12, 2016, 08:49:15 AM

I had a lot of fun creating this, and I'm happy with how it turned out

Minim · June 12, 2016, 12:53:11 PM

I can't believe you still have an Atari ST that works let alone make a music recording out of it. I'm amazed.

Anyway. Is this your own composition or is it from another game? Nice music anyway.

You must have put in an awful lot of effort to create this considering the staves are only visible for one instrument at a time.

mobius · June 12, 2016, 01:08:04 PM

that is very nice! good work. I hope you can record it into a format for a modern computer, apart from just having it on camcorder like the video.

607 · June 12, 2016, 01:34:44 PM

Quote from: Minim on June 12, 2016, 12:53:11 PM
I can't believe you still have an Atari ST that works let alone make a music recording out of it. I'm amazed.

Anyway. Is this your own composition or is it from another game? Nice music anyway. You must have put in an awful lot of effort to create this considering the staves are only visible for one instrument at a time.

Awesome, right? It was my dad's, and we've taken good care of it, so it still works as good as ever!

It's my own, I put it together in an hour or something. It was actually okay: it seems like a pain at first, but while not very efficient, it does work quite well. I don't mind it taking a bit longer either, as I simply enjoy using old hard- and software!

Quote from: möbius on June 12, 2016, 01:08:04 PM
that is very nice! good work. I hope you can record it into a format for a modern computer, apart from just having it on camcorder like the video.

Thanks!
That would be cool. I'm not sure if that'd be very doable, however. I'd certainly need a floppy driver for Windows, probably, which I could get, but that'd cost me some money. And then I wonder how one would convert this, as I don't know of any other program than this one that uses the extension .4v.
I could record it directly using line, but when I tried that before, with a game, the music got distorted because of how the volume regulator works.

namida · June 12, 2016, 10:42:46 PM

QuoteI'd certainly need a floppy driver for Windows, probably, which I could get, but that'd cost me some money. And then I wonder how one would convert this, as I don't know of any other program than this one that uses the extension .4v.

Could you find an old PC with a floppy drive, and use that to transfer it to a more-normal medium (USB or cloud storage)?

In regards to opening it, what's the program? A google search for "4V file" doesn't turn up anything helpful, so perhaps if we knew what program, we might be able to help more with that.

Dullstar · June 13, 2016, 03:05:20 AM

Quote from: namida on June 12, 2016, 10:42:46 PM
QuoteI'd certainly need a floppy driver for Windows, probably, which I could get, but that'd cost me some money. And then I wonder how one would convert this, as I don't know of any other program than this one that uses the extension .4v.

Could you find an old PC with a floppy drive, and use that to transfer it to a more-normal medium (USB or cloud storage)?

In regards to opening it, what's the program? A google search for "4V file" doesn't turn up anything helpful, so perhaps if we knew what program, we might be able to help more with that.

In the description, there's the following line that may be helpful:

QuoteTo earn 4 CP, be the first to post in the comments in what year Microdeal published this version of the software.

I'm going to do some research based on this and see if I can figure out anything useful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdeal

UPDATE: That Wikipedia article is the most helpful thing I've been able to find.

ccexplore · June 13, 2016, 12:09:53 PM

Quote from: möbius on June 12, 2016, 01:08:04 PMthat is very nice! good work. I hope you can record it into a format for a modern computer, apart from just having it on camcorder like the video.

If you just want to listen to it, there are programs out there that can download and extract the sound track from a youtube video into MP3 form, then with a little editing you can keep just the part with the music.

Dullstar · June 13, 2016, 10:27:08 PM

Quote from: ccexplore on June 13, 2016, 12:09:53 PM
Quote from: möbius on June 12, 2016, 01:08:04 PMthat is very nice! good work. I hope you can record it into a format for a modern computer, apart from just having it on camcorder like the video.

If you just want to listen to it, there are programs out there that can download and extract the sound track from a youtube video into MP3 form, then with a little editing you can keep just the part with the music.

I think the thought is that it might be possible to get better audio quality by using the program that made the file; after all, it appears that this was recorded with a camera.

Based on the title of the video, "A Little Something in Quartet on Atari ST" that I somehow didn't notice earlier, I'm guessing the piece was created in a program called Quartet. If not, then I have no idea.

607 · June 19, 2016, 12:47:55 PM

Whoops, I somehow didn't see the posts earlier.
Yup, it was made in Quartet, I found it on this disk:

I do have an old pc with a Floppy Drive, but it doesn't recognise it for some reason. I've tried fixing it for a while, but I gave up on it as, well, it's old, so it might not work at all anymore, and I can get a USB one in the future.
Anyway: it's not needed! Not for getting the music, in each case.
I thought of something I should perhaps have thought of earlier: Line-in recording!
I checked where the cable from the computer to the monitor was, took that one out and put a new cable in, connecting the end to a converter so it would fit in my MP3 player's line-in jack. I was able to record it in pretty much perfect quality, being directly output from the machine to my MP330!
The sound was only in the left ear, but that was easy to fix using Audacity, which I also used to get the wave file converted to a frequency better suited for Lightworks, the video editing software I use.
I then figured I still needed a picture, as I didn't really want to upload a YouTube video without video.
So I booted DEGAS Elite, fiddled around with it a bit to figure out how it worked (come on, I'm not going to read a huge manual...

), and made something quick.
Nothing too special, but exactly how I wanted it. You might not like the picture too much, but it fits my style.
Anyway: of course I wouldn't have done all of this had I not made a new tune.
For this theme, I got to use some more samples, as like the disk says, it includes 35 High Quality Sound Samples, of which some were quite bad or didn't work at all, but some others were very usable.
During the composing process, I wasn't happy with the product multiple times, but eventually it turned out even better than I had hoped it to!

Please have a listen!
https://youtu.be/l2VmnwUWncE