Sound Club
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sound Club is a piano roll-type music tracker that was created by Bluemoon Interactive. It is currently available as freeware at the Bluemoon Interactive website.
Contents |
[edit] History
Before Bluemoon Interactive had been conceived, two students in Estonia named Jaan Tallinn and Ahti Heinla began to construct Sound Club in their free time in 1991. Sound Club was released as shareware in 1993, and was meant for use with MS-DOS. In 1996, by the time Bluemoon Interactive had existed as a company, Sound Club was re-released for Windows 95 and NT. This release contained most of the same features as Sound Club for DOS, as well as many new features. After a few years, Bluemoon Interactive released both versions of Sound Club as freeware.
[edit] Features
Although Sound Club offers a wide variety of voices (instruments) to use, it does not contain many features that change the sound of the voices it uses. However, it does include the default features that every tracker should have, which are:
- volume
- balance
- tempo
Among these features, it also includes:
- Virtual keyboard
- Standard keyboard entering method (ZSXDCVGBHNJM)
- Support for multiple formats (see below)
- sn/sn2 to wav conversion
- Lyrics (DOS version only)
- mid to sn conversion (DOS version only)
[edit] Formats
Sound Club supports a small variety of formats. In fact, each version is capable of using at least four different formats:
- MS-DOS version: mid, rol, sn, cmf, mod
- 95 & NT version: sn2, sn, sm3, mod
[edit] Limitations
While Sound Club is very user-friendly in terms of being able to write music, it does have its limitations.
Limitations of MS-DOS version:
- for 1-voice pattern, max 16384 ticks; for 32-voice pattern, max 666 ticks
- maximum 32 voices
- maximum 30 ticks per beat/beats per measure
- max 200 patterns
- max sequence length 200
- max 64 instruments
- max 65501 bytes samplelength - 8 bits only
Limitations of Windows 95 & NT version:
- no limit to number of voices
- unlimited polyphony
- can export flawlessly to .S3M
- 16 bit samples, no sizelimit
- can directly import .WAVs/raw data for samples
[edit] Criticism
Sound Club oftens receives criticism due to the fact that it is quite different from most other trackers. While most other trackers use multiple columns to represent notes and sound effects, Sound Club uses a piano roll style of editing. If one were to compare Sound Club to a tracker such as MadTracker, the difference between the two would be blatantly obvious.
[edit] Well-known Sound Club artists
[edit] Terminus
Terminus (real name: Jaanus Kase) is a Sound Club artist from Estonia. Seven of his songs that were made in Sound Club, as well as many other songs he has composed, are available for download in both sn and mp3 format at his website.
[edit] Porrey 61
Porrey 61 is a Sound Club artist from Germany (citation needed). His compositions display a great amount of time and effort, as well as great use of volume control, balancing, echoing, and special effects. You can visit his website here, although it is in German.
[edit] Hergiswi
Hergiswi (Chris Horte) is a Sound Club artist from Massachusetts. He has released a number of "albums" on his website, among other Sound Club-related things. He has also been a part of other Sound Club-related projects such as Buttdong Machine and Kakao
[edit] Buttdong Machine
Buttdong Machine was a band that consisted of Ben Winters, Chris Horte, and Gabriel Willemsen. The band released only one album, entitled "Dead Clown Cum." As one would guess, they were a satire band that focused on racism and offending people. In 2006, Buttdong Machine broke up and members Ben Winters and Chris Horte went on to form Kakao.
[edit] Kakao
Kakao (German for "cocoa") is a satire band that uses Sound Club to compose their songs. Their songs, while often composed merely by slamming the keyboard (therefore producing notes), also contain many hints of musical aspects and proper construction of songs. Kakao's songs are often frowned upon, due to their controversial song titles, such as "Buttfucked by Penguins" and "Arabian Skunkfuck," as well as other odd song titles, such as "Adhesive Pork Of The Mind And Soul" and "Get That Frog Out Of My Crapper." Kakao does not currently have a website.
Kakao's first full-length album, entitled "Milk," is planned to be released early in 2007.
