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ambient descriptioncore glitch glitchy it2fss mysterious piano static

I guess I kinda went off-bitpack here. I was originally going for something that one would groove to during the chill-out break of a dance party - the "sway your hips and twirl aimlessly but in sincere appreciation" sort of dance. However, the longer I spent with it, the more abstract it got, and the more I started leaning into a "trying to find a good song on the radio" motif. So does it fit the bitpack? I don't know. If there was a space on actual Big Money dancefloors for Aphex Twin or Portishead back in the day, then maybe there's a space on the BotB dancefloor setlist for this. You be the judge. I'm getting used to not badging, anyway.

Big thanks to Kleeder for the it2fss tool.

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Format-wise, fSound is a bit of a weird duck. I guess I'd describe it as sort of AHX but for PC beeper instead of SID.

AHX makes sense - it's an emulation of the SID as powerful as early-90s hardware could reasonably hope to pull off. It's not completely authentic, no, but again, early-90s hardware. If it's 1996 and you want to make SID sounds but don't feel like digging out your old Commodore from your attic, poof, there's AHX. It's not exactly the same, sure, but it definitely gets the job done.

fSound is much more haphazard - "okay, so like, you want to do old-school PC beeper noises but all you have is a Windows box with DirectSound or whatever. So with this you can do square waves, just like PC beeper, and the markup is basically the PLAY command in BASIC. On top of that, we'll throw in simple white noise, which was, like, technically possible to do on a PC beeper, but kind of a pain in the ass. But no PWM, which was probably easier on a PC beeper than white noise. Now let's throw in two 8-bit mono samples for some reason even though they'd never sound like this on a real PC beeper doing rapid-fire gate-flicks for arbitrary sound. Okay, neat!"

It definitely feels like a fantasy-chip/toy-computer. Now, I certainly don't have anything against fantasy-chips, but fSound just doesn't seem to have much of an overarching Sense, capital-S, to it. I don't dislike it, but it feels much more like a bitpack than a format.

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