Question about Tracker format music support

Hey, so I've got a bunch of old unfinished Impulse Tracker songs I made over 10 years ago but I've noticed a lot of them sound off when I import them into CUSTOM, like it's just using samples by themselves instead of instruments (which are samples with bells & whistles). I'm guessing that whatever the OHRRPGCE uses for MOD, S3M, IT etc. doesn't support things like instruments, volume and panning envelopes and sample interpolation.

So my question is, what formats are fully supported? My hunch is that it's MOD and S3M only, then XM and IT formats are downgraded to the features of those older and less featuresome (is that even a word) formats. But if anyone knows for sure, I'd appreciate it.

I'm thinking of taking parts that I like out of those old tracks and reusing them.

All those formats are supposed to be supported, but any problems with them sounding wrong when playing back is the fault of the music backend.

music_sdl uses MikMod for tracker format support, so it is subject to whatever flaws and bugs are present in that library.

music_native uses Audiere for tracker format support, so it is subject to whatever flaws and bugs are present in that library.

Which music_ backend are you using?

Good question; I'm just running custom.exe in Windows 7 and didn't change any config or command line settings. Not sure if that's SDL or native.

When you run custom, it shows you the backends at the bottom of the screen. It is near the bottom of the screen, just to the right of the build date.

You are probably using music_sdl if I recall correctly that is the default on Windows

Ohhhh. Yeah. There it is right there, derp.

It's music_sdl. Should I try music_native?

It is worth a try, just to see if the music sounds different.

Audiere is an old library, abandoned since 2008, but it might have been a higher quality library in the first place than MikMod

Could you provide a file that doesn't work?

SDL_mixer includes an old version of libmikmod for playing module files. Audiere also uses libmikmod. Do try music_native. My local copy of the SDL_mixer source includes libmikmod 3.1.12 (current is 3.3.7), but I last recompiled SDL_mixer.dll for Windows years ago, probably before 3.1.12 was released. And libmikmod 3.1.11 was released in 2003!

So recompiling SDL_mixer might fix this, but with some test cases I will be able to confirm.