Editing Tools Sound Editor

SFX Editor

There are 64 SFX ("sound effects") in a cartridge, used for both sound and music.

Each SFX has 32 notes, and each note has:

thing	value
A frequency	(C0..C5)
An instrument	(0..7)
A volume	(0..7)
An effect	(0..7)

Each SFX also has these properties:

property	description
A play speed (SPD)	the number of 'ticks' to play each note for. This means that 1 is fastest, 3 is 3x as slow, etc.
Loop start and end	this is the note index to loop back and to Looping is turned off when the start index >= end index

When only the first of the 2 numbers is used (and the second one is 0), it is taken to mean the number of notes to be played. This is normally not needed for sound effects (you can just leave the remaining notes empty), but is useful for controlling music playback.

There are 2 modes for editing/viewing a SFX: Pitch mode (more suitable for sound effects) and tracker mode (more suitable for music). The mode can be changed using the top-left buttons, or toggled with TAB.

Pitch Mode

Click and drag on the pitch area to set the frequency for each note, using the currently selected instrument (indicated by colour).

Hold shift to apply only the selected instrument.
Hold CTRL to snap entered notes to the C minor pentatonic scale.
Right click to grab the instrument of that note.

Tracker Mode

• Each note shows: frequency octave instrument volume effect
• To enter a note, use q2w3er5t6y7ui zsxdcvgbhnjm (piano-like layout)
• Hold shift when entering a note to transpose -1 octave … +1 octave
• New notes are given the selected instrument/effect values
• To delete a note, use backspace or set the volume to 0

Click and then shift-click to select a range that can be copied (CTRL-C) and pasted (CTRL-V). Note that only the selected attributes are copied. Double-click to select all attributes of a single note.

Navigation:

keys	description
PAGEUP/DOWN or CTRL-UP/DOWN	to skip up or down 4 notes
HOME/END	to jump to the first or last note
CTRL-LEFT/RIGHT	to jump across columns

Controls for both modes

keys	description
- +	to navigate the current SFX
SPACE	to play/stop
SHIFT-SPACE	to play from the current SFX quarter (group of 8 notes)
A	to release a looping sample
Left click or right click	- to increase / decrease the SPD or LOOP values. Hold shift when clicking to increase / decrease by 4. Alternatively, click and drag left/right or up/down
Shift-click	an instrument, effect, or volume to apply to all notes.

Effects

value	effect	description
0 none
1 slide	Slide to the next note and volume
2 vibrato	Rapidly vary the pitch within one quarter-tone
3 drop	Rapidly drop the frequency to very low values
4 fade in	Ramp the volume up from 0
5 fade out	Ramp the volume down to 0
6 arpeggio fast	Iterate over groups of 4 notes at speed of 4
7 arpeggio slow	Iterate over groups of 4 notes at speed of 8

If the SFX speed is <= 8, arpeggio speeds are halved to 2, 4

Filters

Each SFX has 5 filter switches that can be accessed while in tracker mode:

filter	description
NOIZ	Generate pure white noise (applies only to instrument 6)
BUZZ	Various alterations to the waveform to make it sound more buzzy
DETUNE-1	Detunes a second voice to create a flange-like effect
DETUNE-2	Various second voice tunings, mostly up or down an octave
REVERB	Apply an echo with a delay of 2 or 4 ticks
DAMPEN	Low pass filter at 2 different levels

When BUZZ is used with instrument 6, and NOIZ is off, pure brown noise is generated.