The TFMXcess Handbook: Using TFMXcess
Description: Documentation for TFMXcess
Keywords: TFMX sound player

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### 3. Using TFMXcess

TFMXcess can be invoked in several ways:

- by left-clicking on a TFMX song file (these files have the prefix mdat.) in kfm
- via the 'K' menu
- via command-line:
  "ktfxshell mdat.mysong 2" for example will load the file mdat.mysong straight away and select subsong 2 in this file (the command-line arguments for songfile and subsong are of course optional).

In version 2.4, TFMXcess will no longer pass parameters to existing instances, it also will not try to detect existing instances.
This removes the possibility of accidental kills, but it also means that you can have as many TFMXcess instances active as you like.
Only one of them can be in control of the player process at a given time, however.

After you have started TFMXcess, you should see a window like the one below (with your theme settings of course):

In this case you see that the file `/home/neo/tfmx/turrican2/mdat.Turrican2_2` is currently loaded and being played. Also you can see the current subsong (7), bits per sample (16), frequency (32 kHz), oversampling (active), channel separation (Stereo) and tooltip-settings (on).
Version 2.1 introduces drag-and-drop for local files. You can drop any TFMX songfile in your filesystem onto the main window to play it. Remote files, however, are not yet supported.

The interface should be pretty self-explainatory, but there are some things you might want to know:

- First, the keyboard commands (the ones given after the slash are KDE standard accelerators):
  - H/F1 - help
  - A - about box
  - P - play
  - S - stop
  - O/Ctrl-O - open file
  - Q/Ctrl-Q - quit
  - 1/PageDown - next subsong
  - 2/PageUp - previous subsong
  - 3 - 16 bit sound
  - 4 - 8 bit sound
  - 5 - frequency up
  - 6 - frequency down
  - 8 - stereo mix
  - 9 - headphones mix
  - 0 - mono mix
  - T - toggle tooltips
  - V - toggle oversampling
- When no file is open and you hit the play button, you will automatically get a file-browser where you can select the file to be played.
  Otherwise, the selected subsong of the current file will be played.
  From version 2.0 on, the buttons/keys for subsong, frequency and bits per sample will only restart the player if it has been active at the time you pushed the button/key. This behavior is much more consistent and logical.
- There is no way for TFMX-PLAY to pass the correct subsong numbers to the frontend (simply because TFMX-PLAY sometimes extracts the wrong numbers), so I have decided to make all numbers available.
  This means you can select any number from 0 to 31 - but don't worry, in almost any file all subsongs are in a straight row from 0 to 5 or 7.
  If you should hit a nonexistent subsong, you will simply hear nothing but silence. That's all.
- The frequency and bps settings are merely treated as a suggestion by TFMX-PLAY.
  This means that if your card should not be able to handle the desired frequency/bps, the player will automatically select the highest possible setting, so the display may be incorrect.
- When you quit TFMXcess, the following settings will be saved (and retrieved next time you start the program):
  - songfile (overridable by command-line argument)
  - subsong (overridable by command-line argument)
  - bits per sample
  - frequency
  - tooltips on/off
  - current directory (for the file-browser)
  - channel separation
- TFMX files always come in pairs: one songfile (e.g. mdat.mysong) and one samplefile (smpl.mysong). Both files need to be in the same directory.

### So much for documentation, now listen to some cool tunes...^_^

You can get several TFMX files from Rudolf Stember's Homepage.
You may also want to check out Sakura Audio.

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