[Other] Music Hacking

[Avara]

I apologise in advance if any of the following questions sound stupid, I'm extremely new to this and have literally no idea where to start with it/lots of questions that Google can't seem to answer about music hacking, hence why it felt acceptable to make yet another thread here =P


After learning as much as I can about editing different parts of the game, I now want to try music hacking, but I have no idea where to start and zero knowledge about it. All I know is that you use a tool named Sappy(?) to insert the new songs - or rather to replace the original songs(?).
But say I already have an idea of how I want the tunes to sound, how do I actually go about composing it? Any particular do's and don'ts I should know about? How long does each song have to be time-wise, or does it differ between fanfares and such?


For reference, I'm using a Fire Red rom and it's the BPRE 1.0 version.


Thanks so much to anyone who can help, I'd be eternally grateful! As you can see, I'm very confused... haha.

 

[GoGoJJTech]

I apologise in advance if any of the following questions sound stupid, I'm extremely new to this and have literally no idea where to start with it/lots of questions that Google can't seem to answer about music hacking, hence why it felt acceptable to make yet another thread here =P


After learning as much as I can about editing different parts of the game, I now want to try music hacking, but I have no idea where to start and zero knowledge about it. All I know is that you use a tool named Sappy(?) to insert the new songs - or rather to replace the original songs(?).
But say I already have an idea of how I want the tunes to sound, how do I actually go about composing it? Any particular do's and don'ts I should know about? How long does each song have to be time-wise, or does it differ between fanfares and such?


For reference, I'm using a Fire Red rom and it's the BPRE 1.0 version.


Thanks so much to anyone who can help, I'd be eternally grateful! As you can see, I'm very confused... haha.

sappy is one of the tools used, since it's the most diverse. Link is in my sappy tutorial (link to that in my sig)
you can insert new songs or replace using sappy, you decide yourself. Composing music should be done using anvil studio (link in my sappy tut)
dos and don'ts are basically don't make it too loud, don't use more than 16 tracks etc
a song can be as long as you want. I could make a fanfare that's neo ghetsis' theme and there will be no problem with that :D
if you need any further assistance come to the chat (link also in my sig :D)

 

[Avara]

sappy is one of the tools used, since it's the most diverse. Link is in my sappy tutorial (link to that in my sig)
you can insert new songs or replace using sappy, you decide yourself. Composing music should be done using anvil studio (link in my sappy tut)
dos and don'ts are basically don't make it too loud, don't use more than 16 tracks etc
a song can be as long as you want. I could make a fanfare that's neo ghetsis' theme and there will be no problem with that :D
if you need any further assistance come to the chat (link also in my sig :D)

Thank you so much for all the pointers, that really cleared things up for me! I'm having a look at your tutorials now and to be honest it's all going over my head at the moment but I'm sure I'll pick it up eventually, haha. I only have one other question; are the GBA tracks 16-bit sound or 32-bit? I tried looking it up but different sites said different things =/. The reason is because I'm attempting to find something which can convert mp3 tracks into that format, if such a thing exists. Anvil Studio looks extremely hard to learn and I literally only need two songs, trying to compose them from scratch just sounds like such a daunting task...


Thanks again for being so helpful, it's seriously appreciated! =)

 

[COOLTRAINER♂]

It's impossible to convert anything other than extremely simple sounds to MIDI, there is no magic bullet to convert songs from MP3.