Before I continued dissecting Readme.txt, I wanted to find out the answer to a question to which I insisting and unconciously go back again and again: how do I convert a SNG file (GoatTracker’s format) to WAV (and then to MP3)?

It seems the answer resides in sidplay, which is a (guess it!) SID player. It can be installed using Synaptic Package Manager. I looked for sidplay and it seems that the libsidplay1 library was already installed, as some other packages such as gstreamer plugins for “ugly” formats depended on it). I checked the sidplay package anyway, and pressed ‘Apply’ as usual.

But sidplay can only play SID files, not SNG files. So we need to export the song from within GoatTracker. This is called packing in their jargon. You can access the option if you press F9.

It will then ask you lots of questions such as “Select playroutine options”, “Start address”, “Select zeropage address”, and finally “Format to save in”. Scroll down with the arrows until you see “SID – SIDPlay music file format” in green, and then press Enter to accept. Then browse to the folder where you want to save the song, type in a filename and all that.

Since I have the ‘ugly’ gstreamer plugins, I can quickly test that my song works by dragging the output SID to the gnome movie player.

And now to output the wav file you just need to open a terminal and type this in:

sidplay2 filename.sid -wfilename.wav

Change the filenames as required ;)

If all went well, you should have a filename.wav file with your rendered song! You can now convert it to MP3 or OGG or whatever you like.