Magical 8bit plugin help anyone?!

[FireVisor]

Hello there fellows!

I've decided to pick up my ambitions to work on vg-music again. I started looking around for ways to make classic 8-bit tunes and stubmled upon

Magical 8bit Plugin http://www.ymck.net/english/index.html

I want to try to replicate classic tunes to get the hang of it. But I didn't get the "demo"-files (.mid and .mp3) they sent to sound "the same".

I can't get the later "bloppy lead" on "track 1" in their tutorial to duplicate the song with the plugin, just right.

I am using Mixcraft for the plugin, and I followed all the instructions for making it sound the same. I found this problem (not expecting anyone to be familiar with Mixcraft but...) You can't give it exact values. Is this Mixcrafts fault or the actual plugin? (I've posted that question on their official support forums also.

Thanks for helping me...

...or perhaps you will just point me in some other direction altogether.

/FireVisor

[Yoozer]

Mixcraft, I'd guess. Garageband and Ableton Live both allow you to directly type in the actual values (albeit that my guess is that it will snap to the nearest one). I don't know if Reaper allows you to type in the values.

However, the plugin lacks an actual interface, so the VST plugin technology generates one for you. A very boring GUI, but functional as long as there are less than 16 parameters or so - if your screen isn't big enough, you're out of luck. That's what happens here.

[FireVisor]

Mixcraft, I'd guess. Garageband and Ableton Live both allow you to directly type in the actual values (albeit that my guess is that it will snap to the nearest one). I don't know if Reaper allows you to type in the values.

However, the plugin lacks an actual interface, so the VST plugin technology generates one for you. A very boring GUI, but functional as long as there are less than 16 parameters or so - if your screen isn't big enough, you're out of luck. That's what happens here.

So you are certain that Garageband and Ableton enables you to type in the value? In my case for MixCraft it snaps to uneven numbers. It's really annoying.

What do you mean about the screen not being big enough?

[Yoozer]

As I said, a VST plugin without an interface gets one that's built by default by the host application (Mixcraft, in your case).

A plugin "exposes" parameters; in this case, OscKind, Volume, etc. Generally, a software synthesizer's GUI will have specialized controls for these parameters - e.g. a rotary knob with a few positions for the oscillator waveform (or even a set of radio buttons), a rotary knob for volume, or a slider for attack/decay etc. All that a GUI does is that it tells those parameters to change to a certain value.

When there is no information about the GUI to be had, the VST format can still expose all available parameters. In the case of 8bit, those are 9 parameters. Since the application doesn't know what specialized controls to use (and it's not going to make guesses), all of 'm are turned into sliders.

Now, you see that 9 controls fit on the screen just fine. Imagine having 60 of 'm - you get an awfully long block of sliders that all look the same. That would not fit on your screen, but that problem is not the case here.

I use Ableton Live myself, and I can type; in the screenshot of GB in my link, you see the textboxes next to the sliders.

[FireVisor]

Yeah, I guess that fills up my head with enough info.

Thank you very much!