
FAQ
====

QQQQ: SoundTracker crashes as soon as I start it or as I press a
button in its window, giving weird X errors.

a: You don't have thread-safe X libraries (you have a libc5
system). Read the INSTALL file.

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QQQQ: SoundTracker complains about not being able to open /dev/dsp.

a: Either you have not configured a sound driver for your system (you
could check that by running an MP3 player or something) - or you are
running GNOME and your soundcard is kept busy by the E Sound Daemon,
which you can get rid of by using "killall esd" in a shell.

There's also an "ESD" driver in the Audio settings, but it's not
possible to do any serious tracking work because of the delay
introduced by it.

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QQQQ: The sound output gets quite choppy under machine load.

a1: Don't run the compiled executable directly, but do a full 'make
install', this installs the executable setuid root and the audio
thread gets a much higher priority. Read the notes in the INSTALL file
about this subject.

a2: Increase size of mixer buffer in the Preferences section.

a3: Disable Double Buffering a.k.a. Flicker-free scrolling. This may
not look exactly nice, but can relieve your CPU from a lot of hard
work (this depends on the graphics card and X server you are using).

a4: Switch away from the scrolling patterns page and disable the
scopes.

a5: Reduce scopes and patterns update frequency in the Preferences
section.

a6: Install at least glibc2.1.1pre3, this fixed a strange sound bug
for me.

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QQQQ: What about MIDI support?

a: I don't have any MIDI equipment, so I couldn't test MIDI-related
code, even if I wrote it. Okay, there is a possibility to receive MIDI
input from other applications running on the computer, but at the
moment I have other priorities anyway. Adding MIDI support to the
program will require a extensions of the file format; in other words,
this is not an easy project.

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QQQQ: Why did you choose the XM format instead of the IT format?

a: Primarily because XM is all what I need in order to make music.
But that doesn't mean that the program couldn't be expanded in the
future towards other formats. The part of the program needing most
work is the editor (the user interface) anyway. You can basically use
it to edit any module format, it just needs tuning and (of course) a
new player routine. But this is not in scope for Version 1.0 of
SoundTracker.

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QQQQ: The scopes don't work, i.e., they show a flat line no matter how
loud my music is playing.

a1: Increase the scopes buffer size in the GUI settings.

a2: If that doesn't work, your OSS kernel driver may be buggy. In that
case, go to the source file app/drivers/oss-output.c, search for the
line that says

    d->realtimecaps = i & DSP_CAP_REALTIME;

and change it into

    d->realtimecaps = 0;

Please report to mk@soundtracker.org if this fixes the problem, and
what audio driver you are using.

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QQQQ: When I use the mouse to cycle the current song position during
playback and when I press 'Ctrl' before releasing the mouse button,
the spin button keeps cycling, which is rather unintended behaviour
:-)

a: This is gtk+ bug #56248. A status report is available under
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56248
