Processing Milkytracker and XM files in Sporth with LibXM

2017-05-10

Over the past few days, I've been playing around with a library written in C that is capable of playing XM files. I have gone ahead and forked my own version on github to hack on.

For those of that don't know, the XM file format was one of a handful of popular module formats in the 90s when music trackers roamed the earth. Originally the file format for FastTracker, the XM module has lived on in 2nd-generation music trackers like MilkyTracker.

From a high-level standpoint, the XM file format (and any module format generally) is comparable to the MIDI file format. Both are largely 8-bit and store information like note events and control data rather than sample data like audio formats like WAV or AIFF. The key difference is that module formats store small bits of sample data, which can be used as wavetables for synths and single-shot samples. Because of this, the XM file is a self-contained entity, requiring no mappings to external soundfonts or synths, as is the case of MIDI. Fully orchestrated songs can be several minutes in length, yet only a few kilobytes in size. Back in the days when trackers were popular, this small footprint was a great feature for hardware with limited bandwidth and storage capabilities.

XM and Sporth

Using my fork of libxm, I was able to build an external Sporth unit generator, capable of loading and playing back XM files. To make it really worth Sporth's time, I added a few tweaks to libxm. This, along with a simplified build system, was my justification for forking in the first palce.

The first tweak I did made it possible to easily access the sound information from each channel, so that they could be processed separately in Sporth. In my Sporth ugen, each channel is written to a position in an ftable. This has the unfortunate side effect of not preserving panning data. A small price to pay for adding channel effects.

The second tweak I made was to have the XM player spit out a clock signal so that the Sporth patch could sync up with the XM file. This makes it possible to sync up clock-based Sporth patches with the music XM file. In addition to this, the Sporth ugen also saves a variable containing the BPM of the patch so that ugens like "prop" can sync with sample-accuracy as well.

Nothing musical has been done yet, but I am excited about the potential here. Sporth has never been good at generating sequences beyond a measure, so being able to use an interface like Milkytracker has some exciting prospects. Furthermore, the idea bringing Milkytracker into Sporth breathes new life into Milkytracker, adding a whole new dimension of sound design with realtime DSP.

Possible Future Plans