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introduction
Furnace is a tool which allows you to create music using emulated sound chips from the 8/16-bit era. For a full list of soundchips that Furnace supports, please see the list of systems.
It has a music tracker interface. think of a piano roll, or a table that scrolls up and plays the notes.
Another core feature of Furnace is its windowing system, similar to that of GEMS or Deflemask, but with a few more features.
Sound generation
Furnace generates sound from 3 different main types of sound sources.
- Instruments are the most standard and most used type of sound source in Furnace. The instrument format is how you can specify parameters and macros for certain channels on certain soundchips, as well as binding samples and wavetables to a format that you can sequence on the note grid. See 4-instrument for more details.
- Wavetables are the way that you create custom waveform shapes for the HuC6280 sound chip. Wavetables only work in the sequencer if you bind them to an instrument. See 4-instrument and 5-wave for more details.
- Samples are how you play back raw audio streams (samples) on certain channels, on certain soundchips, and in some cases, in certain modes. To sequence a sample, you do not need to assign it to an instrument, however, to resample samples (change the speed of a sample), you need to bind it to an Amiga/Sample instrument. See 6-sample and 4-instrument for more details.
Interface/other
Furnace is built to have a user-friendly interface that is intentionally made so that it is quick and easy to get around when working in Furnace. However, we understand that the interface may not be the easiest to learn, depending on how you learn, so there is documentation on it as well.
See 2-interface and 3-pattern to view said documentation.