oh crap, i always thought the player was actually based on follin's code. stupid me.
about the dedicated bass channel, i believe note channel 1 actually gives a slightly better bass, doesn't it? generally it seems to behave in a different way than the other 4 note channels. to me it seems that when you put two instruments with the same settings, the one in nch1 will always be louder, and also notes in this channel don't get detuned as much, no?
about the drums... hehe... i totally failed to take notice of them being different from follin's... but overall they're the weakest part of beep tracker i think... the bass drum is much to loud and cancels a lot of the other sounds, and the rest is so quiet it's barely audible when you play a chord. so it's basically no improvement over having short, interrupting drums (like in phaser1 ), cause now you have to interrupt the sound manually
blablablabla... now i will shut up before i say more stupid things, and make a song with beep tracker.

Just to clear up things: the player routine in Beep Tracker isn't Tim Follin's, it is made completely by Alone Coder. It uses the same idea, however there is some difference, for example sampled non-interrupting drums (Follin's engine has only interrupting click-like drums + AY 'snare'). Also, Follin's engine had dedicated bass channel. In our discussions with AC he said that he initially tried to do the same configuration, without sampled drums and with bass channel, and it haven't made the sound better.

i've already played around a bit with beep tracker and my opinion is that the player is in fact working correctly, like alone coder says. if you listen to some of tim follins tunes you get the same kind of flanger effect as on "big beep" (especially if you listen on original 48k or emulators - alone coders demo tracks are rendered from unreal afaik). also note that most of tim follins tunes were not done with this engine, but with more limited players (only 4 channels mostly). also, as people on wos have pointed out, first of all you need a good ear for music to distinguish the harmonies when composing, second of all there are only few chords/harmonies that are not detuned (again, if you listen some examples from tim follin made with the 6 channel engine, it's the same deal, he always uses very specific chords and player is fine-tuned for his compositional habits. same with the flanger effect, it can be controlled up to a certain point (it's somewhat related to how much the overall volume is sustained/decayed). so i'm pretty sure it's a feature of the original code and not a bug. besides, let's not forget follin was very young when he wrote this routine, so it's probably not very clean code. (i think what's happening is that playback rate is changed during playback to achive different volume levels, not only the pulse rate like in other players. therefore you get a flanger effect because of audible artifact frequencies - kind of like the hiss you get on digital 1bit music, but it changes it's frequency. however i'm no expert so i might be wrong about this.)
of course there's one huge problem: the way the editor works is not very suitable for the player routine. some of the 4 minor channels could be combined into a channel where you can enter chords rather than individual notes. but hey- at least we got this routine available in a tracker, after 25 years!
also, the demo tracks, especially "big beep" are really really amazing, i think. as shiru said, no reason not to have them on your site

Oh cool! I like some Ben Daglish, but I had only heard some of his AY stuff before...

Yes, there is another "key" of sorting - more/less to make them sound as different as it's possible on beeper, one by one, to not to make the listenner bored. The truth is - most songs have been written in Orfeus or similar engines, it might make the listenners tired.

Some people likes Alone Coder's works despite the 'flanger-like' effect. I can't see how this sound problem related to possibility of adding the songs - they are supposed to sound like that and not going to change (they were tuned exactly for this engine, with the effect). Well, if there will be new engine someday, and the tunes will be adapted to the engine, you always can replace the songs or add alternative versions.

I wanted to ask this for long time, but had forgot every time: the songs on the website aren't sorted by author for a purpose?

Thanx, it takes a lot of time to keep it up to date more/less.
I also added today: Mister Beep - "Where the hell is volume control?!?" chiptune.

Well, as for Alone Coder's work - there's a problem. His engine is a huge work but it still have some problems with a weird "flanger" effect. We dunno what is it but there is even a thread on WOS about it:
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/s … hp?t=29305

nice, i have all the other stuff already, i love the grainy sound. thanks!

sweet. this is cool.

Love the site.  Great work!

yeah, keep it going yerz! i've been visiting this site since ages and i have a backup of all the tracks, if you should ever have loss of data just ask me.

and how come you haven't added the recent masterpieces from alone coder yet?

Nice one!

Yo,

some new bigger update on my portal about music generated by Z80 chip:
http://z80.i-demo.pl/music.html

greetz,
Y