13 Audio

Ch. 13 🔊 Audio: Music & Sound Effects

What you'll learn: DRAW's per-theme sound effect bank and tracker-music player, plus how to swap, mute, and customize the audio experience — including MIDI playback and SF2 SoundFont configuration.

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Audio System — SFX, Music & Customization

🎯 Goal: Configure the creative audio experience.

Sound effects (21 categorized slots)

DRAW emits short SFX for distinct UI actions — menus, tools, selection, fill, clipboard ops, layer ops, text entry, sliders, drag-and-drop, and more. The sounds live in the active theme's SOUNDS/ folder as WAV or OGG files. Replace any file with one of the same name to retheme that action without touching code.

You can:

• Globally enable / disable SFX.
• Adjust master SFX volume.
• Mute (independent of disabling).

Background music

DRAW plays tracker modules and MIDI files natively:

Format	Description
.mod	Amiga ProTracker / FastTracker.
.xm	FastTracker II Extended Module.
.it	Impulse Tracker.
.s3m	Scream Tracker 3.
.rad	Reality Adlib Tracker.
.mid / .midi	Standard MIDI Format (SMF).
.rmi	RIFF MIDI (Windows MIDI container).

The Audio menu (rightmost in the menu bar) hosts:

• Auto-shuffle — when the current track ends, DRAW picks a random next track from the active music folder.
• Next track — }
• Previous track — {
• Random track — picks at any time. Use the Random Track submenu to restrict by format: .MOD, .IT, .XM, .RAD, .MID, or .RMI.
• Volume up / down — ±10% increments, independent of SFX volume.
• NOW PLAYING — read-only display of the current track name and format (e.g. NOW: jester - stardust [MOD]). Name is truncated to 32 characters.
• Explore Music Folder — opens the music directory in your OS file manager.

All audio settings persist in DRAW.cfg.

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MIDI Playback & SoundFont Configuration

🎯 Goal: Get the best possible MIDI sound quality.

DRAW uses QB64-PE's built-in OPL3 FM emulator for MIDI/RMI playback out of the box — no extra files required. For richer, more realistic MIDI audio you can supply your own SoundFont2 (.sf2) file.

Configuring an SF2 SoundFont

1. Open Settings (Edit → Settings or Ctrl+,).
2. Navigate to the Audio tab.
3. Scroll to the MIDI Soundfont section.
4. Click the ... browse button to locate a .sf2 file on your system.
5. Click Apply or OK — the font is loaded before every MIDI/RMI track.
6. To revert to built-in OPL3 FM synthesis, click the Clear button next to the path field.

Tip: Free general-MIDI soundfonts such as GeneralUser GS or SGM-V2.01 work well and are widely available online.

How MIDI playback works

• _MIDISOUNDBANK is called with the SF2 path immediately before _SNDOPEN for each MIDI/RMI track.
• If the SF2 path is empty or the file no longer exists, DRAW automatically falls back to the built-in OPL3 emulator.
• The MIDI_SF2_FILE key in DRAW.cfg stores the path so it persists across sessions.
• Drop .mid, .midi, or .rmi files into ASSETS/THEMES/DEFAULT/MUSIC/ and they will be included in random-track auto-shuffle alongside tracker modules.

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➡️ Next: Chapter 14 — Pixel Art Analyzer