CPC Music/Sound question

[Carnivius]

Need me a bit of help regarding CPC music and sound.  I've got two CPC style PC games in development being the Mode 0 style Cosmic Prison Commando and the Mode 1 looking Hotel of Hell and I'm having trouble with authentic CPC sounding effects and music. If anyones played the rather buggy old demo of C.P.C. those sound effects and the ripped from old games music are to be replaced but I just need to know how. 

Basically I want to know how to best generate sounds perhaps in a CPC emulator such as WinApe and then export those.  What programs on the CPC were used for sound generation?

And musicwise, I've tinkered with Digitrakker and Soundtrakker and they're fine but how do I go about exporting a tune I've made in one of those into an AY or YM file and take it out of the CPC disk file and make it appear in the PC's folder so that I can play it with a Windows executable (my games use a plugin intended for Winamp to play the tunes)?

I want to be sure to still have the original sound/music formats too for when I can try getting these games ported to real CPC hardware which is why I don't want to cheat like I had to for Cosmic's demo sounds (which were made with SFXR as a last minute thing and don't sound how I want them to)

Any help would be muchly appreciated.

Sorry if this is in the wrong section.  Please move it to where is most appropiate if it is.  Cheers.

[arnoldemu]

From my own experience I would create sound effects in the same tool you use to make your music.
I think that on a lot of games, such as Stormlord, the sound effects used the same sound driver as the music.

In the old days I think every musician had their own tools and sometimes they hardcoded the values by hand.

Now we have good CPC music tools such as soundtrakker and starkos.
I would recommend starkos.

When you're done, you can use an emulator such as Arnold (a new version I can send you) or JavaCPC to record the sound as a YM tune.You could do this for all the sound effects and tune.
If you needed wav you can create these from the ym tunes (I believe stsound may allow you to convert the ym sounds to wav??)

Hopefully this will help you.

[Carnivius]

Thanks for the reply.  Downloaded Starkos and having a play about with it now.  Seems pretty cool.  Gonna experiment making instruments and sound effects in it before I attempt a proper tune. Perhaps I'll stumble upon some cool sounds that can help cover up my lack of musical talent.

Yeah the sound effects will eventually be wav (or mp3 or ogg, haven't quite decided but yeah a general sound format) and the tunes still as YM hopefully to keep the small file size and my player should be ok with those.

I'd appreciate that new version of Arnold too thanks.

[Executioner]

WinAPE also has a record YM option, and I'm pretty sure it does compression to keep the file size small.

[mr_lou]

There are a few CPC musicians on this forum, and I'm sure they'd make a tune or two for you if you ask.
I track a little myself in STarKos, although lately I've been too busy. I haven't even checked out the new v1.2 yet. But I will for sure eventually.
You could make it a requirement that the tune should be tracked in STarKos, to make sure they're all in the same format.

[Carnivius]

Maybe.  I asked Kangaroo some time ago and he did a couple tunes but I had trouble actually getting them into the game.

Looks like I still am having issues with YM playing. The plugins I've tried (ST Sound and Vortex) just won't do it within my game despite the fact many other Winamp plugins for other formats work just fine (which be why my old buggy demo of cosmic prison commando used AY's of glider rider and switchblade and not YMs).