Arkos Tracker 3 comes with several players. Which one to use depends on your needs, and their availability.
- AKG: Your go-to player. Good balance between speed and memory.
- AKY: Fast player (12 scanlines on CPC!). But the music are also bigger. In league with FAP (see below).
- AKM: Optimized in memory. An interesting alternative to CNGSoft’s Chip’n’Sfx. But much more powerful!
- FAP: CPU stable, fastest with an excellent compression ratio, by Hicks/Vanity and Gozeur/Vanity! For demos.
- SE: Stand-alone Sound effect players. Useful if you don’t need music, only sound effects.
- MOD: Player for MODule (full-sample).
What player to use?
To make it simple:
- Working on a game? AKG or AKM (more limited).
- Working on a demo? FAP (CPC only) or AKY (multi-platform), compare.
- Working on a sized-limited demo? AKM.
- Need more than 3 channels? AKY.
- Need samples (no PSG sound!)? MOD.
- Need short samples along PSG sounds (i.e. digidrums)? AKY (see this tutorial).
- Need pitched samples along with PSG sounds? AKY (see this tutorial).
- Don’t need music, only sound effects? SE.
RAM/ROM players
The RAM players are using self-modifying code as an optimization. This is a drawback for ROM productions, so ROM players have been developed: they use a buffer instead, at a small cost of CPU (the size of the buffer is indicated in the sources). Check their availability.
Samples support
- Full samples songs can use the MOD player (which is 100% sample, no PSG).
- Digidrums can use this player.
- One-sample+PSG can be done via this player.
Platform interoperability
Can a song exported in a PSG of 1 mHz (like on an Amstrad CPC) sounds well on a Spectrum? It depends mostly on the player, and a bit on the song:
- AKY encodes all periods, software and hardware. So it will sound different from a platform to another. You should export the song once again, targeting the right PSG frequency.
- AKG and AKM songs are composed of notes, not period. So in theory, the song can be directly used to another platform. However, pitch effects are period-based, so they will sound differently.
Morality: listen to the song on the real hardware, or load the song in AT3 and set the PSG according to the hardware your are using. Correct the pitch effects/tables if needed! So this means that you may need several versions of a song if you plan on targeting several platforms.