Dust's music and sound — 40 banks, and what a script calls them

Prerequisite: Audio — TRK / SFX / 11K / SND for the container, and Audio — channels & volumes for what plays it.

Dust spells an audio bank .SND where Titanic spells it .TRK, and stores it differently: one table holding every sound, where a v4 bank has a loop table and a one-shot table in separate containers. The port reads both (snd.ts), and the track editor opens all forty.

The name a script asks for is not the filename

playnewtheme and opentrackfile are given a bank's own stored name — its refName, the string at offset 158 — and that is frequently not what the file is called on the disc. Several files can answer to one name.

a script asks for	steps	the file that holds it
"town.snd"	10	TOWN.SND — daymusic1…daymusic10
"town.snd"	5	NIGHT.SND — nightwind1…
"bountytheme"	16	BOUNTY.SND
"bountytheme"	31	KID.SND
"saloonsep.snd"	5	SALOON1.SND
"saloonsep.snd"	7	SALOON2.SND
"saloonsep.snd"	4	SALOON3.SND
"credits"	5	CREDITS.SND
"doorlib"	0	DOORLIB.SND
"flute"	5	UNDER/FLUTE.SND
"helptheme"	11	HELP.SND
"isaopractice.sn"	3	ISAOPRAC.SND
"mine"	11	UNDER/MINE.SND
"mission.snd"	5	MISSION.SND
"salgames.snd"	0	SALGAMES.SND

The town appears twice on purpose. TOWN.SND is the day and NIGHT.SND is the night, under one name — the same doubling the SET side has, where the town is town.set by day and nite.set by night. Which one answers depends on what the game has open, not on the name.

"isaopractice.sn" is truncated in the file, one character short of .snd, and the scripts ask for it that way. It is not a typo to fix: the port matches the name field character for character. Titanic's v4 banks store "BEDRAD1.WAV" and are asked for as bedrad1.trk, so the runtime strips a suffix there; stripping one here makes three of Dust's themes unfindable, the town's among them.

The bank says how many of its sounds are the theme

A v4 bank has a loop table saying which chunks are the music and in what order. A v1 bank has no such container — but it has a pair of i16s at 0x18: how many one-shots it holds, then how many loop chunks follow them. The bed is that many sounds at the end of the name table, and their order in the table is the playback order — daymusic1 through daymusic10.

The two halves sum to the bank's sound count in 40 of 40 banks on the disc, and the loop half lands on the run the names suggest: TOWN.SND is (15, 10) and its bed is daymusic1..10; NIGHT.SND (16, 5) and nightwind1..5; HELP.SND (0, 11) and helptheme1..11. Read as one i32 the field looks like nonsense — 327687 is (7, 5) and 720896 is (0, 11).

The names alone are not a reliable guide to the bed (#325):

• DOORLIB.SND and SALGAMES.SND hold no bed, although lsing1..3 (three hinge squeaks) and discard1..4 (four card sounds) look like numbered runs.
• MISSION.SND holds five, and they are silence wind1 wind2 chantwind1 chantwind2 — two stems, which a single-stem rule cannot see.

The rest are one-shot libraries

DEATH.SND, UNILIB.SND, HOTROOM.SND, the nine gossip banks and the rest hold no theme at all — just sounds a script fires by name. All nine store the name "gossip" (FEARWITT, HAPYRUBY, MARBLOOD, MAYORBLD, MAZIE, MISCLIB, TROTRUBY, TROTSIDE and UNDER/SHAMAN), which is the same one-name-many-files pattern as the themes.

Fourteen of the forty are not in DATA/ but beside the thing that uses them — CHECKERS/, CRACK/, DRUGS/, FIGHT/, SALGAMES/, SCORP/, TARGET/, YUNNIBOX/ and six under UNDER/. The mini-games and the underground carry their own audio.

In the editor

The track editor lists banks by filename, because that is what the manifest has — so the theme names above are not in the list, and night.snd is where you look for the town at night. Open one and the bank's own name is in the track name box, which is the name a script knows it by.

A .SND opens read-only. The page edits v4 bytes in place, and the patch helpers write at v4 offsets — patchLoopOrder edits the loop table in container 1, and in a .SND container 1 is a sound. Writing one back needs a v1 write path, which does not exist yet.

Back to Dust.