Loading songs

When you first see the user interface, you might think "What the schnitzel? This looks really complicated!" But don't worry: There are not really that many controls and you can learn how to handle them quite fast. But let's first start off really simple by just loading a song.

Tap on the icon that shows three pancakes that are poked with a stick (actually I intended to draw a hard drive). This will open the file dialog.

Now navigate to the folder where you stored your XMs (or just scroll down if they are in the top folder) and tap on a file.

To load it, click the "load" button and wait for a second.

You should now see some strange numbers appearing on the top screen. You can use the d-pad to scroll. You should also see that the list on the right becomes filled. This list shows the instrument names. But alomost no XM composer uses it for that purpose any more. Instead, they put additional song info into the instrument names. Wanna see how the instruments look? Then tap on the icon next to the pancakes that looks like a sound wave.

What you see now is the sample that belongs to the instrument selected in the list on the right. You can select other instruments in the list and play them by using the keyboard. You can see some more song information by going back to the first screen (click the note icon).

The list with the strange numbers on the left is the so-called pattern order table. It defines the order in which the different parts of the song (called patterns) shall be played. On the right, the number of channels is displayed. This number may be higher than 16, but only the first 16 channels are actually played. Below the pattern order table, ,there are two numbers that have to do with the speed of the song: Tempo and BPM. Increasing the BPM makes the song play faster, as you might expect. But when you increase the tempo setting, the song speed decreases. Don't ask me who invented this. You can think of tempo as the coarse speed setting and the BPM as finetuning. Below the speed controls, you see the name of the song. Don't like it? Then push the "..." next to it and change it.

Did I forget something? Well, the "play" button plays the song :-)