New MoonSound Music Studio beta

TNI has released a new beta version of MoonSound Music Studio (MS²) for the people who donated. MoonSound Music Studio is a new tracker based on MBFM and MBWAVE for the Moonsound and supports FM and WAVE channels in a user specified split at the same time.

This update comes with a lot of bug fixes and some new features. In the new version good progress was made on the pitch envelopes and tempo mechanism, but it's not entirely finished yet. These features, together with the options to switch channels between FM and WAVE and saving your music, are expected to be finished in the new beta. Last but not least, a start was made with the manual. It's not fully finished yet, and TNI would appreciate help on this.

Full changelog:

• MWK import was fixed and cleaned and now replicates Moonblaster's behavior
• MS² now has its own keyboard handler and no longer uses the BIOS. Currently there is support for International and Japanese keyboards. This will allow mouse support in future versions.
• Disk drives are selected inside the file selector and it properly deals with situations such as Disk Offline.
• Configuration is saved on program exit, instead of being a manual option in the configuration menu.
• While playing, space bar now stops at the current pattern, just like the STOP key already did.
• In the wave editor, CTRL+up/down and CTRL+left/right are swapped, to have the same behavior as CTRL+up/down/left/right in the music editor.
• "Modulation" is now called "Pitch Envelope" and is rewritten, but not yet finished. M, P+ and P- events are all the same thing now. The length of each envelope is dynamic in theory, however it's currently not possible to change the length in the editor.
• The instruments manager was improved to allow insertion and deletion of 2OP, 4OP and WAV instruments with INS and DEL keys.
• Tempo is specified in division of the interrupt frequency (tempo 2 is fastest and tempo 31 is slowest). Under the hood it makes use of fixed point, which will allow the next version to have a Beats Per Minute setting!
• Detune command is now key [U].
• The CMD channel which was left over from Moonblaster is gone. Tempo commands, transpose and base tempo can be placed in any channel.

If you want to support the development of this new tracker and want to help with beta testing, you can sign up as a beta tester by donating at least 15 euro. Details can be found on the TNI project page.

Relevant link MS² - MoonSound Music Studio