the quick start guide and concepts list are great first steps in getting used to the tracker way. after that, try exploring the demo songs to learn more about how to get the sounds you want.
yes and no. Furnace can be successfully built for Android and it even has some rudimentary touch UI support, but it's extremely unfinished and extremely unsupported. there are many good reasons that it's not in the official releases yet.
nope.
there are no plans for this.
Furnace keeps backups of the songs you've worked on before. go to file > restore backup.
set the pattern length to a multiple of the number of beats (6 or 5 as mentioned above). don't forget to change the row highlight values to match!
there are two common methods:
- use delay commands (
EDxx) to offset notes into their correct places. this is good for the occasional set of tuplets, but if you expect to use a lot of them... - plan ahead for the song to have them by making your pattern length a multiple of that number. remember to adjust row highlight values to match.
depending on the tempo of the song, it may only be possible to get perfectly even tuplets by changing the tick rate. mind that this may hinder playback in games or sound engines that use the vertical blank interval for their timing.
each chip has its own set of limitations regarding what frequencies it can play. if these limits are likely to be found in normal tracking, they'll be mentioned in that chip's documentation.
not yet, but it's in the early development stage.
it's in the plans, with no target date.
it also is in the plans, with no target date.
the N64 lacks any form of audio synthesizer chip. many games use MIDI or XM or other such formats internally, but everything is mixed in software and sent to a simple stereo DAC.
probably not, as with very few exceptions these are effectively all the same.
no. MT-32 is used with MIDI in 99.999% of situations. it lacks a direct register interface.
also, Furnace is not a MIDI tracker....
nope. Furnace is not a MIDI tracker.
There are fundamental differences between formats that cannot be directly translated. an import should always be considered the starting point of a conversion, not a final product.
nope. it's a feature that's been requested many times, but there are no plans to implement it.
for NSF import, you can use a modified version of FamiTracker called NSFImport and then import the resulting .ftm into Furnace. it's all speed 1 though, so don't expect any songs to be nicely laid out with instruments and all.
one way is to use OpenMPT to open the SF2 file, and save WAV files from there. Polyphone is another way.
use split700 to extract the BRR samples from an SPC. there is presently no way to import envelopes or other parameters.
extract FM patches from a VGM file using vgm2pre or similar tool. bear in mind that these are only the parameters for the FM synth, and the way the instrument is heard in-game may include pitch bends or other effects that can't be extracted.
for PSG instruments, see the next question.
PSG chips (such as those in the systems mentioned) don't have any inherent concept of instruments or patches. all of that is handled in software, and each sound driver has its own way of doing things. generally, the only option is to recreate the instrument from scratch.
nope. Furnace is not a MIDI tracker.
just as Furnace offers a choice of emulation cores, VGM players may use different cores with varying degrees of accuracy. also, some aspects of a song may not be supported by the VGM format, such as chip clock speeds.
while Furnace did start life as a DMF player, it's grown in functionality quite a bit, and many Furnace features simply don't exist in that format. there are also cases where the emulation cores in DefleMask sound different from those available in Furnace.
each system will need its own method of converting Furnace songs into code that can be played back on hardware. this requires writing a driver for the hardware in question, which is no small task. that having been said, there are several efforts in progress, both for direct export from Furnace itself and external converters such as furSPC, furNES, and furC64.
not presently. for now, use an external converter such as FFmpeg.
if a question isn't answered within this manual, check in the GitHub Discussions to see if it's answered there, and post if needed.