Homebrew PC Composer/Sequencer for NDS music?

[Screvvy]

Hey!
I wanted to ask here just in case it's out there, but is there by any chance a PC program that can be used to create music for the NDS hardware a la Famitracker? I've been searching around and I thought NITRO Composer could work but I couldn't find it, most likely due to being an internal tool not available to the public. So, how do homebrew devs make music for the hardware and such?

 

[FAST6191]

Pick your poison really
There are a bunch of tracker/module formats supported by DS homebrew libraries, technically there is a midi library as well, the DS can support (AD)PCM in hardware and is fast enough to decode some common audio formats as well (most reckon MP3 is a bit too demanding for the ARM7 to leave you the ARM9 to do the rest but MP2 and said wave stuff is plenty doable).

http://gamebrew.org/wiki/List_of_DS_homebrew_applications has some more. Many of the programs are at times almost demos/example programs for libraries.

 

[Screvvy]

Pick your poison really
There are a bunch of tracker/module formats supported by DS homebrew libraries, technically there is a midi library as well, the DS can support (AD)PCM in hardware and is fast enough to decode some common audio formats as well (most reckon MP3 is a bit too demanding for the ARM7 to leave you the ARM9 to do the rest but MP2 and said wave stuff is plenty doable).

http://gamebrew.org/wiki/List_of_DS_homebrew_applications has some more. Many of the programs are at times almost demos/example programs for libraries.

Yeah, but what about programs for use on PC that lets one make DS music (or at least songs resembling that of the DS's format, again like Famitracker)

 

[FAST6191]

The DS does not have a "format" or predefined/common sounds like many older devices-- you have some 16 independent (including independent volume as well as master volume) channels of full wave/synth/noise with samples in the seconds range and more besides if you want. There is no chip providing set samples or limiting frequencies or only doing certain decays or doing anything like that and it is pretty much all software from the ground up. Though some devs stuck with the provided sound bank and SDAT format many other devs then took advantage of that and made some fairly custom things, either in general or with the SDAT sound format.
Have some hardware docs if you want
http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#dssound
Such a thing technically even goes back to the GBA with it also being able to do some quite custom things and not have hardware get in the way, though not to the same extent as the DS.
http://belogic.com/gba/ (navigation at the top)

I guess you could rip a sound bank from a DS game you like (the dls format was the more popular one people adopted to try to convert the sbnk files to) and in turn use the samples from that. VGMtrans should be able to do that, I have not tried the newer versions with it but the older ones had DLS files that worked but seemingly not very well with openmpt.

 

[SLiV3R]

Yeah, but what about programs for use on PC that lets one make DS music (or at least songs resembling that of the DS's format, again like Famitracker)

Unfortunately not. The only tracker on the DS is nitrotracker. And that is sample based only. Not so fun imo. Even though Nitrotracker is a great piece of homebrew. But I want Chip synthesis stuff like Famitracker too.

If you are interested, join our 3ds discussion thread about these kinds of things!

http://gbatemp.net/threads/old-time-demoscener-new-to-3ds.420119/

 

[PypeBros]

schismtracker + libntxm was the winning pair for me until they dropped .XM format support out of schismtracker

 

[SLiV3R]

schismtracker + libntxm was the winning pair for me until they dropped .XM format support out of schismtracker

But schismtracker isn't for the NDS!

 

[PypeBros]

ah. My bad. I may have missed the nuance between "for the DS" and "on the DS" ...

 

[SLiV3R]

ah. My bad. I may have missed the nuance between "for the DS" and "on the DS" ...

Hmm. But Schismtracker isn't either for or on the DS. Or?

 

[froggestspirit]

But schismtracker isn't for the NDS!

a PC program that can be used to create music for the NDS

I don't know about doing music from scratch too much, but I used FL studio for most of my stuff. You can convert between midi and sseq, and use predefined instruments. There was also a program to make instruments (convert wav to swav I believe?). It's been a long time. There was also a sdat player for ds

 

[PypeBros]

Hmm. But Schismtracker isn't either for or on the DS. Or?

Well, it's easy to configure SchismTracker so that it only uses 16 tracks. From there, custom code on the ARM7 can easily playback e.g. a S3M track (or better, an .XM track with libntxm). There isn't much more hardware constraint you need to care about except maybe for the total amount of sample space you're using.

There isn't real chip-sound synthesis on the DS. The hardware mainly plays back samples, so a modtracker is almost the perfect tool. Of course, you can use chip-sounding samples if you want a chip-tune.