Recently I’ve gotten into rendering videos of my chiptunes using SidWiz. It’s a neat program!
As far as I know, the best place to find the latest version of it is on the About page of the YouTube channel of its developer, RushJet1. He’s also a really talented chiptune musician, so check him out!
I’ve found a way to automate some of the tedium of making these videos by writing a shell script that uses SoX to automatically boost each component wave to the maximum amplitude possible without clipping (SoX will apply dither which will sometimes push a few samples above the max, but this isn’t really an issue since the waves are just being used by SidWiz to render the visuals) and apply a fadeout. Here it is! If you don’t use Linux, you can run this using Cygwin or something similar to it.
#!/bin/sh mkdir -p gained mkdir -p sidwizzed for f in *.wav do sox "$f" gained/"$f" gain -n LENGTH=`soxi -d gained/"$f"` sox gained/"$f" sidwizzed/"$f" fade h 0 $LENGTH 15 done
I like a fadeout length of 15 seconds. Anything else just feels too fast to me. If you’re cool with that, just render an additional 15 seconds after the end of the last full loop for each track. Otherwise, change the 15 on the second-to-last line to whatever value you want.
I also like the half-sine fadeout pattern, it seems the smoothest to me. If you’d prefer a different fade, check the SoX documentation and pick the pattern you prefer. The default is logarithmic which I don’t like at all.
This will create two directories, “gained” and “sidwizzed.” The former can be deleted, and the latter contains the tracks you want, nicely boosted and faded. Put ’em into SidWiz and watch the magic!
