Vivaldi User Guide

The Music Monitor

The music monitor can only be accessed when there is some music playing. To enter it, either:

Click the right mouse button (ADJUST) on Vivaldi or TrackPlay's icon bar icon, or
Press F12 and type "VMP Monitor" or (for those who really like to type) "MusixPlayer_EventList" and press RETURN.

To exit the music monitor, click a mouse button or press ESCAPE; if you used the F12 method to get into it, you will then have to press RETURN to return to the Desktop.

The control keys are listed across the top of the screen in the music monitor. They are:

Forward / Backward,
Pause / Continue,
Restart music,
Examine samples,
Speakers Off (S and 0 together),
Speakers On (S and 1 together),
Ctrl and Middle / Left / Right / Alternating stereo,
Right arrow key (go to next tune in playlist),
Up / Down arrow keys (volume up/down),
Space (repeat tune if in playlist),
Z (fix music - see below),
Quit (and stop music),
F1 / F2 / F3 - music quality high/medium/low,
ESCAPE to leave the monitor but keep the music playing.

Music virtually never needs fixing any more. If the music clicks a lot, plays the samples wrongly, or muffles channels a lot, try it, but it can cause these things if there is no problem!

Note that playing high-quality 8-channel music can also cause these symptoms; if this does happen then your machine is probably too slow to handle it (my ARM2 A3000, for instance, can only play 8-channel music at medium quality).

Playlists are controlled by TrackPlay - see its entry for details.

The stereo settings are shown on the screen in hexadecimal, with negative meaning left and positive meaning right. The green waveforms are the channel outputs, reading left to right (first row: 1,2,3,4 second row: 5,6,7,8). The bars show pitch (top bar) and volume (bottom bar). The text under the scrolling red data is the name of the sample currently playing on that channel. The scrolling data shows the events being played - the brightest one, in the middle, is the current event.

For each channel, the format of the event data is "nnn ss eevv" where nnn is the note ("---" means a rest), ss is the sample number, ee is the effect number, and vv is the effect value. If there are too many channels for all this to fit, the data is shortened to "nnn ssee". All numbers are in hexadecimal.

Examining the samples allows you to play the individually. You can go there directly from the Command Line with "VMP Samples" or "Sample_Display". This display is fairly self-explanatory - the control keys are listed on the screen, and the computer is played like a musical keyboard.