| Posted By
Luca
on 2023-03-08
06:57:41
 |  Hey HVTC, You've Been cRTED!
 HVTC had seen the light something like a dozen years ago. Although gathering executable .prg files which need a real machine or an external emulator, soon the main target of the project has become clear: have a modern player and a vast, near complete, collection of TEDsound music to be played on any nowadays PC. A proper format would have been needed first, and passionate coders like Gaia (TedPlay) and Siz (SIzPlay) gave their contribute to reach a valid choice which could include all the possible variables and data to convert every given music in a common, generic, dedicated format.
Today we present a new milestone in this long lasting mission, one signed by Hermit, former author of the famous TEDzakker. cRTED is a PC based music player running on both Windows and Linux OSes, playing TEDsound music converted to the brand new .TED format. The latter is actually an enhancement of the .TMF format introduced by Siz with the possibility to have the header/metadata at the end of the file, and this means that the new format can be both recognized by the cRTED player, and run as a normal .PRG file on any real machine or emulator! There's the possibility to use it as a command line with several options to input, but it obviously shines when used thru its GUI, featuring all the useful options which can be requested for this tool: infos display, restart/pause, fast forward, repeat/advance, volume control, switchable channels, fast/slow playlist scrolling all mouse and/or shortcut keys driven. The playlist in .TEL format is basically an editable text which can easily be edited by anybody, and includes both single files and entire folders.
The whole suite comes with the HVTC-ted source files, where the actual HVTC-ted converter can be used to re-create the HVTC collection into the new format, and the HVTC-ted (2023-03-08), currently a good selection from the whole HVTC (soon to be swapped with the complete one!).
This represents the 1.0 version of the cRTED project, which already includes shared and static library forms for a better inclusion in other TED-playback projects, looking forward to be ported to the largely used RockBox like its C64 cousin cRSID which is now the main SID-playback engine in RockBox.
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Posted By
Murphy
on 2023-03-08
06:57:41
| Re: Hey HVTC, You've Been cRTED!
Wow, that's awesome!
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Posted By
Luca
on 2023-03-08
07:05:31
| Re: Hey HVTC, You've Been cRTED!
Fantastic achievement @Hermit, and it represents that step forward we all need in order to have the famous general TEDsound format we've searched for all these years. .TED format works as brilliant as you thought, but of course this is just the 1.0 version only, a good point where to start.
- some voices into the GUI are still weird, because the GUI itself is actually a port of the cRSID GUI, but LOAD SIZE and INIT fields currently refer to exomizer-packed files (all the HVSC files are exomized executables!) with absolutely no consistency 
-there's way to troubleshoot it E.g.: Way of the Tiger plays regularly as .prg but runs doublespeeded in the player.
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Posted By
siz
on 2023-03-08
10:09:15
| Re: Hey HVTC, You've Been cRTED!
Nice to see something moving forward to have metadata for our TED music.
Although I still have my doubts about being able to use this new(ish) format on a real computer with a native player for the same reasons why I started the TMF initiative long ago: without proper metadata and uncompressed music player routine we can't have a generic player.
Of course this one still can be played by browsing the disk, loading something, running it then reset and start over.
But I am a lazy bastard, I like to use my SizPlay to browse music on my SD2IEC and play them from that.
Having the metadata at the end of the file means I have to rewrite the current loader code which reads metadata first and decides about relocation of the player before loading actual music. And having compressed music player routine means its completely unusable in SizPlay because I have no way to write a generic decompressor for them.
But at least we will have metadata in the collection (which actually we already have in plus/4 world HVTC database just have to extract it and append it to the music data itself).
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Posted By
Hermit
on 2023-03-14
04:24:36
| Re: Hey HVTC, You've Been cRTED!
This TED format and cRTED and HVTC-ted is a shortcut to have this continuously playing player+musiccollection from the current HVTC for the users. Still took much work like filling/editing playtimes and getting other metadata from htmls, but there's even more work to be done by e.g. Siz's TMFtool to get HVTC even more sophisticated. Apart from some exceptions (like some multi-subtune tunes in 'edits' folder) I didn't disturb the exomized HVTC tunes of Luca just added the metadata by HVTCted tool. They're essentially RealTED (RTED) as an analogy to RSID, starting at $100D or by BASIC SYS command. I hope most tunes (which are of the simple init+play type) will be replaced by proper PTED(PlayTED, again an analogy to PlaySID) ones that are more native player friendly, need less emulation requirements but still have the native BASIC starter code.
If that happens the headers+metadatas can be at the beginning of those files again. And if my proposed backward-compatible additions get their way into the TMF format, its new version will be the same as TED format. Don't forget that I kept all fields the same as TMF, just the BASIC line-number has a meaning when it's bigger than 4095: it points to the header(+metadata) in Plus4 memory. But if it's less than 4096 or points to the beginning, the TED format layout is identical to the TMF format. There's no restriction on the place of the header, can be at the beginning/midlle/end, so it's a format backward-compatible to TMF, so-to-speak. The TED name is used just as a distinction until including my ideas in TMF happens. I still hope the .ted extension will be kept in long term because it seems more logical. (Resembles .sid and tells more about the filetype, seems similarly occupied by other tools as TMF.)
Those 9..10 old tunes (AFAIK about 1%) of HVTC-ted that don't play quite right in cRTED (too fast or slow, like 'Way of the exploding fist') are tunes that use complex KERNAL routines for timing, but there's no complete KERNAL included in cRTED, that's why. I solved this for many tunes but not all. Also Csabo's tunes playing for hours from ROM content sound different after 1..2 minutes due to this...
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Posted By
Gaia
on 2023-03-14
15:09:53
| Re: Hey HVTC, You've Been cRTED!
I think the extension should remain PRG as long as it's executable on the actual HW. The .TED extension was actually "wasted" already when - back in 2012 - the first version of tedply came out, as there are a handful of files with it, essentially having a slightly modified PSID format inside - which is of course not executable on the actual HW.
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Posted By
Hermit
on 2023-03-20
03:37:09
| Re: Hey HVTC, You've Been cRTED!
Thanks Gaia for showing up and giving this info about .TED extension. As I didn't see those .ted files you're talking about I consider them obsolete and don't mind if the .ted extension gets reoccupied for my .TED (updated TMF) format. The '.ted.prg' extension would be the most logical to please both PC and Plus4 worlds but on Linux/Win systems I had problems with the association of this unique commodore-tool specific double-extension. Associating a simple .prg extension to cRTED would be harmful to emulation associations on the other hand (and cRTED 1.0 now assumes simple BASIC-starter file by this extension and doesn't process TED-header, but that's to be improved by seeking for 'TEDMUSIC' magic-string even for plain .prg files). That's why I concluded the .TED extension as adequate. Tools that convert/transfer from PC to Commodore might be another story, for example my Turbo-Chameleon64 prefers the .ted instead of .ted.prg on the SD-card, because it won't necessarily remove the .prg before being written to floppy disk.
Whatever, it's simply a renaming procedure to have .ted.prg instead of .ted. (And my HVTCted tool can produce .ted.prg files intsead of .ted if it's compiled after modifying this in the #define at the source's beginning.))
Again, if the TMF format (and tmftool, tedplay) incorporates my additions/extensions, then .ted and .tmf melts into one and the same, then decision can be made which should be kept alive...
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