Tracker Bars   Desktop Bars for SoundTracker tunes

by Jonathan Hunt


Tracker Bars is the second of the two SoundTracker applications on this month's disc. It provides an attractive graphical display while a SoundTracker tune is playing. It supports both 4 and 8 track tunes, with the pitch of each track represented by the height of the bar, and the volume by its shade. It also provides information on the tune, and start, stop and pause controls.

USING Tracker Bars
Running Tracker Bars will first load the public domaim module, PlayerMod, which is located inside the !Tune.files directory, and will then install the Tracker Bars icon on the icon bar. Click on this icon to open the Tracker Bars window. Now double-click on a SoundTracker file, or drag its icon onto the icon bar, to play the tune. The tune's name will be displayed in the title bar of the Tracker Bars window.

THE MENU ITEMS
Clicking Menu over the Tracker Bars window or icon will display a menu containing five items in addition to the usual Info and Quit. If no SoundTracker tune is loaded, the five items will be greyed out.

The first item, tune Info, leads to the About this tune window. This window displays the tune's name and author, its length and speed, the number of voices it uses, and the current pattern number.

The Pause option can be used to temporarily pause the tune. Clicking on Play will play the tune from the position at which it was paused.

The Kill item will stop the tune playing and totally remove it from memory. When you kill the tune, the Tracker Bars window will close and the five menu items will be greyed out.

Clicking on the Fade option will turn the bar fading feature, used to represent the volume of each track, on and off.

NOTE
If you copy Tracker Bars onto another disc or hard drive, remember to copy the !Tune directory as well, as Tracker Bars looks for the PlayerMod module inside it.


 Copyright RISC User 1993
