FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions:

We need YOUR HELP to improve uade. Your suggestions, problems and questions have made and will make uade better. Ironically problems have often been fruitful to us. For some problems and questions we may already have an answer for you in this file. Otherwise, please email us - we like to hear from our users.

Q: Where do I get more music?
A: look at the end of the uade-docs/formats text. There are several links there, where you can provide yourself with a lot of Amiga music.

Q: What amiga formats does uade play, yet?
A: already a few:) Have a look into the uade-docs/formats text. There's a list of formats uade is already successfully able to play.

Q: Why is <insert your favourite amiga music format> not supported?
A: Hmmh, most likely the existing replayer does not (yet) work with uade. But maybe it will when developing goes on.

Q: I have a bunch of Amiga custom tunes which don't play.
A: Send us the file and we'll take a look at it. These kind of problems are sometimes very fruitful. It has happened to us many times that we fix uade for 1 song and as a result we get few more formats working with our infrastructure.

Q: In console I try to play a Customtune with following command line:

> > uade -P players/CustomMade -M CUST.Title

> ...and uade crashes. Even the -force switch doesn't help.

A: CustomMade is a replayer for Ron Klaren(RK)/Ronklaren(RKB) soundfiles. Custom music files are treated more like replayers by uade. They can be directly played with the -P and no -M switch:

> uade -P Customtune

Alternatively you can also just pass the Customtune without the -P switch and uade will figure out what kind of file it is.

Q: Help! Uade compiles without problems but "make test" or the console uade/pwrap.pl doesn't work.

A: There could be several possible reasons for it:

- you are using one of the sound daemons of Gnome/Enlightment (ESD/ESound)) or KDE2 (ARTS)
  use instead of "uade" the following:
- for ESD: "esddsp uade [parameters]"
  for ARTS: "artsdsp uade [parameters]"
  E.g. esddsp uade -P CUST.awesome

- It could also be possible, you are using the ALSA sound drivers, while uade uses OSS by default.
- Compile/Configure your ALSA with the OSS compatibility layer and the console uade and pwrap.pl should work fine.
  if you have SDL with support for these sound daemons or sounddriver compiled in, you can also compile uade to use SDL for audio output. just: ./configure --with-sdl.

Q: Does the uade xmms plugin play mod files?
A: Depends on what the term "mod" is referred to. Playing Sound-, Noise- and Protracker mods and several packed formats should work alright. S3Ms, XMs, ITs are not supported, and probl never will. Uade is meant to play Amiga music formats, while s3ms and so on originate from the pc, so a native player for these formats like xmp should be preferred.

Q: But the xmms plugin does not play any mod files, they get played by the mikmod/modplug input plugin....

A: Unfortunately :) both mikmod and modplug are before uade in the list of input plugins, so you have to disable mikmod to get uade to play mod files.
If you use modplug, you might get around disabling the plugin at all. Amiga files normally come with a prefix, like mod.knullakuk while pc formats have a suffix, like "catchthatgoblin.s3m", so if you rename your protracker mods back to the amiga standard, protracker mod files get played by uade all others will get played by modplug.
The problem does not apply for the xmp (another very good modplayer for xmms, btw), because it comes after uade in the list of input plugins.)

Q: Some of my TFMX (mdat.*) files are played all wrong, or not played at all with the xmms plugin, while they work fine with the console uade.
A: Try enabling Compatibility-> "detect some files by contents..." in the configuration dialog of the xmms plugin of uade. The plugin will try to recognize the contents of the file and hopefully choose the right replayer, then.

Q: Some TFMX (or other song/sample combination) musicfiles are still not played at all, while they can be played with W*namp without problems
A: Amiga music files orginally used prefixes for most of the cases, and UADE by reusing the amiga replayers behaves like the good old AMI in that respects. So, if you have renamed your TFMX files to something like *.TFX/*.SAM in order to play them on W*nDOS then... a) shame on you ;) b) rename those file back to the orginal Amiga mdat.*/smpl.* combination.

Q: Can I use the 14bit <insert your favourite noteplayer genie> noteplayer from my Amiga with uade?
A: No. The noteplayer genies are not supported.

Q: On my platform uade compiles but "make test" does not produce any sound.
A: Not all is lost maybe. If there's an output plugin for xmms for your platform, there's a chance you still might use it as an xmms input plugin. And if there's no native audio hardware support for your platform in uade at the moment, but a port of SDL (http://www.libsdl.org) exists, you can try to configure , compile and install uade with SDL sound output: -> configure --with-sdl

Q: Will you port uade to <insert your favourite platform here>?

A: quote from the old website ;)

> > "Ports to other operating systems /processors will hopefully be implemented in the future"

If you think you can contribute or even want to port uade to your platform please feel free to contact us.

Q: Is there a more convenient way to use uade from the console?
A: Yes, when you run configure it will report a bin path. In there you will find a script which will help you accomplish this. It is called pwrap.pl. Pwrap is a bit more powerful then the spartanic uade console tool but requires perl to be installed. Pwrap.pl also has the ability to browse the Aminet archive via FTP and download the music from there to play it directly.

Q: I don't like to use XMMS. Isn't there another X Interface for uade?
A: Yes, there is. pwrap.pl also comes with a nice TK interface for x11.

Q: I'd like my Filemanager to know the Amiga music file formats instead of treating them as "unknown".
A: There are compile time options to enable MIME-TYPE generation from the uade xmms plugin for either Konqueror/KDE2 or ROX 1.2x. Uncomment the defines for your filemanager in config.h and recompile. To generate a mime-type entry for the Amiga music formats, then, open the xmms configuration -> uade -> System -> Create xyz MIMEtype.

July 2003, UADE team