Wow. Reading through my old posts, it seems I believed version 3 was close to completion back in September. It's had - what, two major rewrites since then?
Yes, eight months is a pretty miserable amount of time to spend putting this archive together, isn't it?
Anyway, I have finally - finally! - uploaded what I sincerely hope will be the very last version to the AMP FTP. Archive size 12,538,306 bytes.
I've changed a lot, and sometimes I changed my mind about changing things, and I decided it was finished about three times. And it's also 4:00am, so excuse me if I have absolutely no clue why you should prefer this new archive to that old one.
I think the major changes are that it's now much more intelligent about writing sample data, and doesn't perform conversions where unnecessary, and it also tries to make the pattern lengths in the conversion line up as much as possible as those in the original data (you'll have noticed that there used to be a lot of patterns which start in the middle of a phrase).
An unnecessary sample conversion is one where there's a more or less 1:1 mapping between the RJP sample info and the S3M equivalent (say, a reasonably straightforward snare drum), which means the original data can just be written straight in without having to 'record' it, losing quality. As a result, some tunes (try FotAQ-12-02) are now noticeably higher quality, as well as smaller in file size, than before.
And there's loads of miscellaneous stuff too. In the previous version I recorded some samples at half quality because I thought they played so low you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, but it turned out you could, so now everything's in high quality. Unfortunately that caused all the file sizes to near-double, hence all the time I've been spending trying to optimise the conversions by other means. I've also got a little doohickey which detects sample which are identical in all but volume, preventing duplication of sample data.
But the real reason the archive's a megabyte smaller is that I cheated and deleted a load of songs which were either duplicates (a lot of Chaos Engine music) or dull (Diggers ingame music - well, that's my excuse, the real reason was that I couldn't get the S3M format to play nicely with the newly astronomical file size). There are now 209 S3Ms.
In summary: higher quality (maybe), more accurate conversions (possibly), smaller file sizes (in some exceptional cases).
Please don't hate me.
Source attached. I know how you all love reading that stuff.
