Transposing NES Music & sound effects - nroflmao/Famitracker GitHub Wiki

Use nsfimport to import the original ripped NSF file:

Select File..Import NSF

When importing, note the Track number. Many tracks exist but you can only import one at a time:

Once imported, save it as a *.ftm format and reopen it in Famitracker.

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You will notice the first line has many of the instrument settings which will be carried throughout the song. Note that it uses a simple instrument and handles all "instrument" effects using the effects channels. This is not necessarily supported by NESmaker / GGsound /etc so we need to translate some of this to instruments. Note NESmaker uses GGsound which has these limits: http://www.gradualgames.com/p/sound-engine.html

The volume column is not supported so we need to translate this into note cuts (or stop sounds) and instruments.

V02 translates to Duty cycle. Be sure to keep the Sequence # aligned with instrument # or it becomes an organizational nightmare to avoid inadvertently changing a sequence already used on another instrument.

Note cuts can be accomplished using the note cut or by creating a Stop Sound note. Stop Sound seems to be more robust for NESMaker which uses GGSound Update: I'm tempted to replace all the "--" Note cuts with Stop Sound notes as these seem to be more robust, especially with sound effects. The problem is then when doing an instrument replacement, these notes get changed with it which is a problem with music tracks where its hard to filter the stop sound notes out from the regular notes without using "--".
I would probably finalize a track (if i know i'm not going to change it anymore) with stop sound notes but too much work as long as still modifying the track.

I typically name my instruments after the effects envelopes I've applied

NESmaker supports import of files that are 256 rows x 3 Frames or lower. Anything longer than that will get an error when importing to NESmaker. I like to Export to a Temp Text file and import into NESmaker to make sure I didn't create an error so i still have the old text file to reimport if needed. NESmaker is very finicky about the format (no hyphens in name, etc refer to tips & tricks section) so its good to import a draft file first to make sure it work.

Original tracks are often much longer than allowed by NESmaker, so need to cut and paste and patch together the section you want most. I often break it down into sub-songs.

Here is my transposed file with changes i made circled. Notice I started my track from a copy/paste from the middle of the original track. So i had to copy some of the effects settings down from the top of the other track which were inherited from the place I cut. The V02 is probably not necessary/used in NESmaker but I added the Duty set to 2 to take care of that. I've also found that where the P (Pitch) effect is used, the Duty set to 2 is also a good replacement. Trying to use the actual Pitch effect in the instruments tab makes it sound very different.

The frames won't likely line up so that is the tricky part. When starting a new frame, you may need to replay the notes at the top of the frame that are supposed to be carried through (A#4 on Pulse 2 is example here, other notes were stopped before this) or else you will hear the note drop out in NESmaker when crossing frames (might be a ggsound thing).

Here's an example from a different song which shows how i had to re-apply the note sounds to fix the note dropout when imported into NESmaker:

Here's an example of transposing a Sound Effect. I created an instrument which follows the Volume scaling shown in the sound effect. I like to leave the effects channels in the transposed files not because they do anything (they don't seem to have an effect once put into NESmaker / ggsound) but so i can remember what the expected instrument is supposed to look like and where the effect sound cuts are supposed to happen.

Update: Use the Stop Sound Note instead of the "--" to stop a sound effect or you will get strange cuts in your music when you play a sound, etc. Probably a good tip in general only to use the Stop Sound since the "--" sound cuts seem to be buggy in NesMaker / ggsound. But the drawback is when replacing instruments, the stop sound note will get replaced as well so for music its still easier to use the "--" note as it won't get hit by instrument replace.

From this transpose I can see the volume envelope I need and that I need a Duty 2 (V02) and a sound cut note. I also like to double up the sound effects on both Pulse channels to give the stereo effect