Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Website: - https://tildearrow.org/furnace/
Price: Free!
Blurb: “the ultimate chiptune music tracker.“
I like Alternative.to as they always have reasonable Linux alternatives listed. The cross referencing, however is broken. Say notepad had fifty alternatives, and I click on one of those, I may only get back ten alternatives for that one, instead of fifty. I was looking for a SID player, when I short circuited and searched for MilkyTracker alternatives and only found two alternatives for Linux. That can’t be right, I thought? I squirrelled for a moment and I ended up with Furnace. Furnace turned out to be so much more than a SID file player. I think it is an amazing find and while I do not buy the infinite monkeys at typewriters will type Shakespeare, (anything times zero is still zero, even infinity) it was lucky to run across this.
So what is Furnace then? In essence it is a sound chip (audio processor) emulator and a sound tracker. That would mean it should be able to play back files too, right? I immediately tried and was greeted by a warning:
Warning aside, it played the file like a champ!
To understand why I like MOD and SID files and the like, you need to consider the size. If I take the C64 file for: “There’s a computer in my backpack and a chiptune in my heart”, it is 5k in size, versus the .mp3-file that is 100% the same, at 3MB!! While that does not seem impressive when people have 30Mb .flac-files, you need to realise I can store 600 of those for every .mp3-file and have no audio loss. Yep, there is no audio loss, because instead of being a recording, it is a “recipe” for the song to be generated, every time you play it.
Installation
Unfortunately, since the project is still in the pre- ‘version 1.0’ stage, there is no installer, you can download the project as a zip file and unzip and run the executable. For a project that is still so early in its development, it is well rounded, with documentation, demo’s and instruments all bundled in the zip file.
Terminology
If at any stage, any of the terminology like ‘ADPCM’ is foreign to you, you can simply look it up in the provided manual, in PDF format.
Usage
Before I started, I looked at the list of supported sound chips / systems that it emulated and the list is truly impressive! If you load up a file, the system auto detects the system that the file is from and I have yet to find a file to fool it. Even early Amiga MOD files, before pro tracker, got detected correctly. That said, I’m sure none of you reading this wants to hear about my playback escapades. (For those of you familiar with Milky Tracker, this is similar.)
Furnace is a tool for creators! I can hear some of you now, “have four channels, will travel”. While I have about as much musical flair as my neighbour’s cat, I’ll try to guide you as best I can. To understand what we are working with, we need to identify the main parts. The application is clearly delineated into a top and bottom half. The top has four blocks, the bottom half has numbered rows with dots in a large block and a helpful panel listing effects. The large window is where you will be spending most of your time, composing your music. If you pay attention to the helpful panel to the right of the main one, you may have noticed that all the effects have odd numbering. That is because the tool works in hexadecimal. Yes, that hexadecimal, as in, base sixteen. If you cannot do hexadecimal, then count on your fingers! How do you do that? Simple! Using your thumb, palm towards you, point it at your pinky finger. It has three joints, the first being zero, then one, then two. Now move to the next finger and continue from the top down until you have reached the bottom of your index finger, then count the four fingers themselves, still using only your thumb and you have 0-15. Mentally mark 10 as ‘A’ (meaning that your pinky by itself is C) and you are set!
The first line in the main window is line 0. Go ahead and click anywhere on that line. Now, using your arrow keys, move the little highlight you placed, around like you are playing ‘snake’. Now hit the space bar. The line will turn red, indicating that you are in recording mode. Hit space bar again to turn it off. Easy, no?
Before we move any further, I want to explain that time moves ‘down’ in our main window. If I play a note, the note following it will be below that one. (though there are clever ways to jump around, I just want you to understand how time flows inside Furnace) Right, navigate to zero again and hit the space bar to record.
Now press: zxcvb and press the space bar again. (If you know music, don’t judge, I’m trying to make people excited for something they can do themselves, rather than making “twinkle twinkle”) You heard the tones coming from your keyboard presses. Your keyboard acted as a piano and you laid down your first notes. Those of you that are on the ball, may have tried to press the play button, to find that there was no sound and the lines just kept running down, regardless of where you moved the highlighted block. This is because the player plays the whole ‘pattern’ from 0 to 63, before either looping or moving on to the next. You will need to hit one of the “repeat” buttons to get it to play. So now you know the “flow”. So to play what you just laid down, use the arrow keys to move the highlighted block over a note or pattern and hit Enter. ;)
You may have noticed that the “notes” you recorded only appeared in one column. Each column is a “channel” capable of only playing one note per row. You add multiple channels, with different (or the same!) instruments to make up a tune.
The amazing part of tracker software is that you don’t have to lay down each note perfectly, it just has to be there to be manipulated, after the fact. Post-processing, if you will. If you listen to our notes we just laid down, the first will play, then the second cuts in a split second later, taking over, and so on. If you look at the oscilloscope output while it plays, you would see sine waves getting tighter, but other than that, remain the same. If we take it at face-value, if there is a note on every line, we play 16 notes per second. Now move your highlighted block to the second note and hit the delete key. Skip the next and remove the one after that, Now we have a knit one, slip one pattern. When you play those, note that each note keeps playing until the next one starts. The blank lines did not equal silence.
While we did not touch on samples and instruments and building patterns to make songs and the like, you now now enough to be dangerous. If you want us to run an article or two on making a tune, let us know at: misc@fullcirclemagazine.org, or reach out to me on Telegram on the group, otherwise we end it here.