What is this fcp stereo thing anyway?
From looking through various famicompo entries, I found a great deal of NSFs that had a lot of channels being used, and sometimes, depending on the creator, they would squish each other. I thought why not make stuff sound so much better and spread it out.
To do this spreading out effect I used NSFPlay/NSFplug with a custom configured channel mixer. The pans are given below, 50 is the center.
The 2A03 pulses are at 25 and 75, so as to be half left and right. The triangle, noise, and dmc are not moved.
The vrc6 pulses are reduced to 80% volume and on hard left and right, the sawtooth isn't moved.
The MMC5 pulses are at 31 and 69, slightly less spread than the 2A03 pulses.
The VRC7 and N163 have their available channels panned out in distribution around 50, but none of them are on the center. This means the vrc7 has 3 left and 3 right and the namco has 4 left and 4 right. They have been distributed at the interval page up/down moves you on the sliders, so as to give a wet piano style effect.
The FDS and Sunsoft5B haven't been touched.
The renders then are batch run through the remove varying offset in GoldWave to correct the large DC offset present in anything rendered by NSFPlay, and then each one is examined from the end to remove any long periods of silence left over from NSFs that explicitly stopped. Most just loop, and in this case, a 5 minute playback time with a 5 second fade out was configured in NSFPlay. Some songs that have strange ending scenes or other small song transitions have had these extras trimmed off, though sometimes rather abruptly because there was no silence period.
I do believe this brings a decent bit of quality to the song, especially when songs chain up vrc7 or namco channels as a whole backdrop. I have selected entries that sound good to me in the stereo rendering, some may be a bit too much for your head though when they don't use the center at all!
Currently entries from famicompo pico 2015 and 2017 are put in this selection, they each have their own folder.
The file name is just the entry number, and for the few NSFs that have subsongs, an underscore followed by a single digit is used to indicate what subsong this is.
The browser renders are 320KBPS CBR mp3 in joint stereo encoded with lame3.99r. Hopefully this eliminates the breakage mp3 introduces to the white noise sound present in chiptunes, but is still compatible on all platforms. ID3 tags are also present for media libraries/players.
Any render requests go to @x0_1372 on twitter.