AdLib Visual Composer

AdLib Visual Composer

Release type: Retail
Release date: 1987
Author: Ad Lib, Inc.
Website: EA.com
Related tools: Sound Designer

As it turns out, all along there was a readily available program for composing the FM-synthesis music used in RSD's Game-Maker. In the late '80s, Ad Lib, Inc. released the first widely supported sound card for IBM-compatible PCs. For this card they released an intuitive graphical interface for composing .ROL format music files and building sound banks.

Visual Composer was widely used amongst turn-of-the-'90s PC developers, in much the same way as Deluxe Paint and Autodesk Animator became standard game development tools. When Creative later grandfathered the same FM chip into its own Sound Blaster cards, PC composers simply continued writing in their familiar, if nonstandard, format. All it took was a simple utility to crunch the .ROL files into Creative's native .CMF.

Visual Composer is simple and fully featured, considering its vintage. With some twiddling you can even bend and taper notes at will. The only major features it lacks are an undo function and a way to stretch or compress blocks of notes in order to fit a new time signature.

Generally the .ROL files sound a little more distinct and roomy, but it largely depends on the player. To implement the music files, Game-Maker needs to further process them using Sound Designer.

Also included with Visual Composer are AdLib Instrument Maker, for constructing sound banks for use in Visual Composer, and AdLib JukeBox, for rocking out to the fruits of one's labor. Jukebox includes several sample tunes in various genres, some of which have become sound library staples over the years.

Tips

• To change samples in Visual Composer, click anywhere above the piano roll (where by default it says "PIANO1"), then hit F4 to bring up the instrument list. You can swap instruments on a beat-by-beat basis if desired, though for the sake of sanity it makes sense to broadly limit yourself to one sample per channel.

• If you want to vary drum attacks or instrument volume, you can do it on a note-by-note or beat-by-beat basis by selecting DISPLAY/TEMPO. Likewise you can alter the pitch accuracy, to allow for pitch bends or chorusing effects.

• To change time signature, under DISPLAY select "Ticks per Beat..." and "Beats per Measure...".

• To gain an extra three instrument channels, under OPTIONS choose "Without Percussion"; the trade-off is that you lose your tone-free drum channels. If you're clever, though, you can compress most of your drums into one or two channels, with frequent instrument changes.

• Note that using the tom-tom channel will distort the tonality of the other drum channels.

• Visual Composer will tend to lock up while playing longer files; to stop playing at any time, hit CTRL-I.

Editing and interface

• Visual Composer supports many familiar keyboard and mouse shortcuts -- CTRL-C, -X, and V for copy, cut, and past; Shift-click to select a range of notes.

• When you cut a selection of notes, be aware that all notes to the right will snap to the left, to fill the hole left by the missing notes. If you want to leave the rest of the channel intact, instead of cutting you can select "clear" from the menu.

• When cutting and pasting blocks of notes, note that you also are copying any instrument, volume, and pitch changes. If you are copying notes from one instrument channel to another, you may want to check that all the settings are consistent with the target channel.

Other tips

• When editing the JUKEBOX.DAT file to set up a playlist, note that the player will ignore the last line in the file -- so at the end of the file make sure to always enter a random character or garbage phrase on a new line.

Links

• Videogame Music Preservation Foundation Wiki
• ROL2CMF - For converting .ROL files and sound banks into .CMF files.
• Various other converters - MIDI to .ROL, and so on. Expect to do lots of cleanup.