c64 sid music

[Elvi]

So i stumbled on a song for my c64 via youtube and to my surprice when i tried to play it on my own c64 via sidplay64 v0.7 it just stops so i'm guessing out of ram issues.
Heres the page that i got the files from http://noname.c64.org/csdb/release/?id=32474

The orginal release is the .d64 file on that page and that one works probably becuase it has a player and the sid in 1 file 94 blocks, the sid file there is 50kb large 200~blocks and i havn't been able to run it on the c64 at all, only managed to run it on a windows sid player.

The thing i'm wondering if anyone has stumbled on the same sid in a smaller package without a player so it can be loaded into a player on a floppy and run it?

As a side note, anyone have any other "neat" sids i could try?

 

[Elvi]

No ideas?
I'm not too used to playing music on my c64 that's why i'm asking, mostly only programs and games.

 

[carlsson]

I tried the following setup in WinVICE:

Drive 8: SIDplay64 v0.7
Drive 9: Fanta's SID directory

I got the following songs to play:

Fanta in Space (51325 bytes) - blank screen, so UI completely shut off
I Love My 64 (38263 bytes) - screen full of @ characters, but UI still shut off
Desert Dream (30974 bytes) - UI visible but not possible to use any longer
House (28086 bytes) - UI visible and possible to navigate to load other songs

However just like you I was unable to play back the song you're asking for, which is 51310 bytes. I suppose it could be due to its size, so you will be stuck to the single filed D64 with a much smaller player routine and no UI. I doubt you can expect to find the song in any smaller form, as it seems to contain quite a bit of samples. Perhaps there is a C128 or REU version of SIDplay that can utilize extra memory?

 

[Dave Farquhar]

Wow. Getting anything bigger than about 30K would be very difficult to get to play on a 64, due to the memory layout of the machine. With some juggling it might be possible to get a 40K contiguous area opened up, but then you still have to find another area for the program itself to sit.

I do seem to recall a 128 SIDplayer, and 50K+ files shouldn't be a problem on the 128 since both memory banks have contiguous free areas that are larger than that.

 

[carlsson]

I found this piece of software, but I can't even get it to load the older PSID format, much less RSID songs:
http://sites.google.com/site/h2obsession/CBM/C128/sid-player-128

Unfortunately Sidplay64 won't load and run at all in C128 mode.

As a matter of fact, I found more references to SID players for ZX Spectrum 128, Amstrad CPC128 and Enterprise 128 (!) than I saw ones for the Commodore 128. I suppose all Commodore users would boot into C64 mode anyway so not any obvious reason why to run it in C128 mode.

Back to the songs, I tried these songs in Windows. In the old version Sidplay2/w (June 2005) which is light on CPU usage, I found that "Fanta in Space" won't play but "All You Know (Is Wrong)" does. In the newer version Sidplay2.5/w (Feb 2009) which at least on my computer uses significantly more CPU, both songs play. In the case of Sidplay64 though, the exact opposite it true. If both the Windows and C64 software had shown the same limitations, one could've imagined it being a more advanced RSID format in the problematic song. I suppose the HVSC team and perhaps also GRG/Shape might appreciate bug reports about which songs don't play in which player, if it is a major issue for you.

 

[barythrin]

Couldn't you use a memory expansion cartridge? Any guess as to the likeliness of these songs being made by new technology and saved to sid/d64 format via emulation?

 

[Elvi]

@carlson, i don't have a c128 so i can't try with that anyway.

@barythrin, i don't have any memmory expansions, my c64 is stock so far.

just something i wondered about, are there any programs to compress sid files so they take less space? considering the sid in question is smaller with a player built in there has to be a way, i'd just prefer to have 1 player to play multiple songs, takes a litle while to load every file you want to play, i don't have anything other than a 1541 drive and a cassette drive to save data on.

 

[carlsson]

The trick is that the single filed version indeed is crunched, packed or compressed if you like. However it is decompressed into RAM before it is executed, so the amount of memory used still is roughly 50K. Of course you could crunch a SID file as well, but in order to play it you would need to decompress it. Some files might be constructed in such way that they only need partial decompression as they go on, but in that case the music and player routine need to be structured in that way from the beginning. In particular if the song uses rather large samples, it would be impractical to decompress on the fly since samples are sets of volume levels or other parameter that need to be changed very quickly, often several thousand times per second. To have a routine first decompress each byte of data before it can be played back would probably not make those samples possible to play at all.