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The 1-Bit Forum → Sinclair → 1bit web radio
There is a web radio with beeper music on zxart.ee
I invite everybody to coma and listen 
It would be really good if you could also register and vote for the melodies - portal lacks objective ratings at the moment and requires your help with voting.
Cool! And I should do some more conversions as well. I just never get around to it, my life is mostly code, eat, sleep, repeat these days.
Converting everything manually is a lot of work.
This could have been done much, much easier if there was .ay export in beepola. Unfortunately, author of beepola is busy with a next version and doesn't have resources to make it happen.
It would be really nice if somebody could make a tool to export beepola songs (compiled in bin? asm?) to .ay version. I could have done it myself, but I just don't know nothing about .ay version or what technical difficulties can there be with different engines (rom's required and so on).
Since I would have written it in PHP, it would be opensource and it would be integrated into ZX-Art, so uploading beepola file would automatically produce playable .ay container.
Does not seem much different, the same number of actions:
- Load .bbsong into Beepola
- Export WAV
- Encode into MP3
- Upload MP3
- Load .bbsong into Beepola
- Export .bin
- Convert .bin with a tool into .ay
- Upload AY
Also, with simplistic approach these AY files wouldn't be suitable for publishing, as each one would have to contain copy of ZX48 ROM, so they would only be useful as intermediate container for MP3 conversion.
This may sound easier at first, but mp3 way have some potential problems:
1. We also need OGG file, because mp3 is not supported by Firefox
2. At least some AYs can be played on real hardware or converted back to binary which can be played on real ZX. This is a common policy of ZX-Art: everything should remain as compatible with real hardware as possible.
3. One day we will get rid of MP3/OGG scheme through Javascript implementation of ZXTune
http://codef.namwollem.co.uk/spectreZX_CODEF.html
4. We don't have all .bbsong sources, so for some files we would still have to convert everything manually through ZXTune.
5. I'm afraid that I'll have to ignore ZX48 ROM and any similar copyright problems. The future policy of ZX-Art is going straight opensource, so everybody would be able to start his own copyright-free copy of ZX-Art. Honestly, this is what I intend to do.
One more problem: disk space
6000 melodies already take 30gb of disk space.
One thing I should say about using .ay files for collection purposes: it don't really suits for beeper music. I believe a new better format should be developed, at very least the old standard should be updated, before making a new music collection. Including copies (complete or partial) of the ROM into each file is really a major format design flaw. It also wouldn't hurt to add support for expanded memory and all extra sound devices ports (Covox, SD, etc), to store custom digital music and things like that.
I totally agree, that there is a need in an appropriate specific format for storing beeper files.
Would it be possible to make such a format playable on ZX? It would be good.
However, I'm not a beeper expert, I won't be able to make a spec for such kind of format. Until then, we will move on with what we already have - .ay format. It would be possible in future to make a mass-conversion of all collection to a new format. I highly doubt that anybody would rip all the existing files from scratch, so a conversion would be required any way.
why isn't the .ay format suitable for beeper music? So far it seems to be storing the music with accuracy, but maybe I'm wrong.
To begin with, it has been developed in ~1998 for Amiga, way before accuracy in emulators became important and even possible.
The main flaw of the format, though, is that it does not actually consider ZX Spectrum enviroment, i.e. there is no BASIC ROM in the emulated memory space by default, and most of beeper music players rely on having it in place. If you don't take it into account while ripping/converting music, it may easily get the drum sounds changed, or lost them althogether. Or, in worst case, all timings will be screwed up (Special FX/Fuzz Click engine has this issue), or code won't work at all (ROMBeep is an example). To make it work correctly, you need to include portions of the ROM into AY file, so you need to determine which portions actually used, which is not so easy, as to do this you need to understand how an engine works. Alternatively, to save your time, you can include whole ROM (in fact, if I remember correctly, it is not even possible, first two bytes will be missing anyway), and basically redistribute a copy of it with every AY file.
All this could easily be avoided would the format specs were explictly saying that memory space should have ROM pre-loaded (distrubuted with players, not with music).
There are other things that could be improved and cleaned up as well.
The 1-Bit Forum → Sinclair → 1bit web radio
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