DigitalCD 3.11

New versions of DigitalCD, TimPlayer and DiskSample are available from:
http://www.riscos-digitalcd.net/digitalcd/player/download.htm

Here is also my latest attempt to rewrite old sound modules (DSymPlayer, DestopTracker, …) making them call TimPlayer internally:
http://www.riscos-digitalcd.net/sound/utils/emultim.htm

Here is the list of changes:

Digital CD, Version 3.11, 2018-08-16

Bug Fixes:

TimPlayer, Version 1.26, 2018-08-16

Changes:

Bug Fixes:

DiskSample, Version 0.55, 2018-08-16

Changes:

Bugs Fixes:

Thanks for your work.

Just had a try with ‘Desktop Tracker’ v1.04b (32bit) – Tim/Desktop player loaded ok.
RO5.25 (23 Apr 2018) VRPC-DL

But player doesn’t start.
No crash or lockup.

For info
Running with QTM/Desktop modules works – when ‘Portable’ rmkilled – otherwise ‘portable’ cuts in and slows the emulator – music not then so good.

But player doesn’t start.

Indeed, TimPlayer doesn’t seem to see the memory area passed to the DesktopTracker module as containing a valid song.
Will have to investigate what that are contains, and ultimately for the tracker application to behave correctly
I would have to watch changes to that area due to edition and reload the area in TimPlayer (which transforms
the original song in its own internal structures).

Anyway, you can use the Juxebox instead if it is only to play songs.

Running with QTM/Desktop modules works – when ‘Portable’ rmkilled – otherwise ‘portable’ cuts in and slows the emulator – music not then so good.

The same is true on RPCEmu with the ‘Reduce CPU usage’ option on. When I was recently trying to check how the DSym behaved in order to improve the emulated version, the sound was completely hacked. It seems that the emulators rely on having some graphic activity as an indicator of CPU usage.

Interesting – when used with VRPC-DL RO 4.02 – the sound is ok.
So how does RO5 handles thing differently?

Interesting – when used with VRPC-DL RO 4.02 – the sound is ok.
So how does RO5 handles thing differently?

On the IOMD version of RISC OS 5 I’d expect there to be very little difference – it’s still using the same IOMD-specific version of SoundDMA that RISC OS 4 will be using. OK, there’ll have been a couple of upgrades over the years, but nothing which affects the overall approach to buffer filling.

I suspect the real problem is that emulators are too eager to put the CPU to sleep for long periods of time when Portable_Idle is called. If the emulators are doing their job properly, they should be able to wake up the CPU at the right time for the audio to be generated – or if the host OS doesn’t allow sleeping with sufficient granularity, they could at least fudge things a bit (run the emulated system’s clocks faster than real time, so that the emulator can buffer up enough audio data to allow the emulator to go to sleep for a ‘long’ period of real time)

Indeed, TimPlayer doesn’t seem to see the memory area passed to the DesktopTracker module as containing a valid song.
Will have to investigate what that are contains, and ultimately for the tracker application to behave correctly
I would have to watch changes to that area due to edition and reload the area in TimPlayer (which transforms
the original song in its own internal structures).

Just for info, the application passes a memory area to the module in the variant of the SetMemory SWI where offsets are replaced by direct pointers, something TimPlayer cannot currently handle.

Dear André…a question may be a bit off topic regarding the update…is it possible with !DigitalCD (or another tool) to convert my old Digital Symphony mods into 16 Bit WAV or even MP3 ?

Download the modules doc archive

In addition to documentation, sources and examples, it contains also conversion tools which are basically the equivalent of the modules but saving the output as 16-bit WAV files. For Digital Symphony files, the one to use is TimAbs.

Can !DigitalCD (or any other RO application) play AAC (.m4a, iTunes) files?

DigitalCD does not support AAC, so far IIRC only the MPlayer port can play them.

Thanks André…conversion works very well, good sound quality of the WAV’s !