Jam (Just Another Musicplayer) v. 2.0 beta © 2006 Cream

Introduction

In the late 70s, early 80s, when the first homecomputers were provided with 'real' soundprocessors, a new kind of enthusiastic user came up. The Chipmaniac. Living in his own little world, he switches on his machine for only one reason. Computermusics. Funny little songs of three or four soundchannels, made of simple square waves, noise, or triangles, sometimes filters and simple realtime- effects. He loves to listen to these noises, which 'normal' people consider painful.

He meets his mates to swap demos just to get some new pieces of his favourite composers. And he gets mad challenging endmonsters in chance to get a new levelmusic or an endmusic. After some time he gets bored playing games and starts ripping the songs for his growing collection. But he isn't satisfied by listening to his fave songs only at home, so he records them on tape or CD to enjoy them by driving his car or riding his bike, wherever he wants to.

He grows older, buys new generations of computers and expieriences new, different styles of music. One day he remembers the old songs. His old machine isn't available anymore so he explores the net for the old chippies and for emulators. His taste of music is still a mystery to his new friends. He doesn't care. He's a chipmaniac...for good.
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The Concept

'Jam' was originally programmed for Atari 68K-computers. The idea behind the project was to deliver an opportunity to replay the most poular music-formats from C64, Atari XL and Amiga on Atari STE/Falcon-computers.

Today we're spending more and more time working on Windows-based PCs and there isn't a fully satisfying solution for replaying YM2149-chipsounds on these computers yet. So this is our attempt...as the first version was also not really satisfying (in fact it was crap), here we go again, hopefully better this time. Jam isn't planned to be another ultimate multiformat-player, but we'll probably add some Atari-related formats, or other fprmats that are very popular to Atari-sceners.
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How to use

Even to average chipmusic-listeners a program like Jam should be self-explanatory. It's not much different than other musicplayers. But maybe some explanation of selected features might help a bit.

Load a song
Select a musicfile using the program's file-selector, drag & drop, or associate musicfiles with "Jam" (can be done in the settings-dialogue). All selected songs will appear in the playlist, even subsongs, so that every piece of music will be shown in the list. Note that dropping on the main window will clear the list, while dropping on the playlist will append the files to the existing list.

Play a song
A song will be replayed by pressing the "Play" button or by doubleclicking on a playlist-entry. In standard-mode the player steps through the playlist using available playtimes. If a song does not deliver a playtime, a default-playtime will be used. You might change the playtime modifying the playlist-entry or the song's header-information. Exisiting song-information will be shown in the main-window.

Replay modes
The standard playmode replays each song in the list and stops playing when the last song is over.
"Loop list" restarts playing the list.
"Loop song" plays the actual song in endless-mode, ignoring playtime.
"Shuffle" plays all songs in the list in a random order.

Record mode
Jam offers the recording of a song in ".wav" format by pressing the "Record"-button. Select a destination-file and the song will be written into that file until the recording is stopped.

Playlist
The playlist shows songs and subtunes of selected musicfiles. You can navigate through the list, modify it and change information of a song. Clicking with the right mousebutton opens a contextmenu, which offers different options to either change playlist-information or the musicfile itself (e.g. SNDH-header, depending on the musicformat). Note that changing playlist-data does not have effect on the musicfile itself.
Disclaimer: This Jam-release is still under development and although we try to test accurately, we can not take responsibility for any kind of damage which might be caused by our program.
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Changelog

Version: 2.0b, feb 05, 2006

This version differs so much from version 0.9b, that most of it might be considered totally recoded. So we only list some highlights here:
Version: 0.9b, may 2003

first release, simple SNDH-player, YM-2149 soundchip-emulation
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Credits

Main program by Abyss
Soundemulation and Design by Tao

Starscream 680x0 emulation library by Neill Corlett
(corlett@elwha.nrrc.ncsu.edu)
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Feedback

For bugreports, suggestions or other kind of feedback just contact:

E-Mail: jam@creamhq.de
Website: www.creamhq.de/jam
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