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This page answers frequently asked questions about Furnace. If you don’t find your answer here, check the GitHub Discussions.

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General

The quick start guide and concepts list are great first steps in getting used to the tracker way. After that, try exploring the demo songs to learn more about how to get the sounds you want.
Yes and no. Furnace can be successfully built for Android and it even has some rudimentary touch UI support, but it’s extremely unfinished and extremely unsupported. There are many good reasons that it’s not in the official releases yet.
No, for several reasons:
  • In order to test any iOS app on an actual device, the developer must pay a hefty 99 USD per year to enroll in Apple Developer Program. Furnace is free and non-profit.
  • Developing for iOS requires an Apple computer and an Apple device for testing.
  • Even if an alternate store were used, you would still need a method to sideload an app to your device. Jailbreaking an iOS device isn’t an easy task.
For these reasons, an iOS build will never happen until a major shift occurs in Apple’s policies.
Furnace is developed to be able to run on operating systems as old as Windows XP, on downright ancient (Pentium III) 32-bit CPUs, with Linux ABIs dating as old as 2015. Safe to assume any computer made past 2010, no matter how underpowered at time of release, will be able to run Furnace perfectly.

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Minimum Requirements

  • OS: Windows XP SP3 32-bit, Ubuntu 16.04, Android 6.0, or macOS 10.9
  • CPU: Intel Pentium 3, AMD Athlon 64, or 32-bit ARMv7
  • GPU: Any (software rendering)
  • Storage: 25MB (program) + 200MB (config and backups)
  • RAM: 768 MB
  • Display: 800x600
  • OS: Windows Vista SP2 64-bit, Ubuntu 20.04, Android 11, or macOS 10.15
  • CPU: Fourth-generation Intel Ivy Bridge, AMD Zen, or AArch64 ARM CPU
  • GPU: Any GPU supporting OpenGL 3.0, OpenGL ES 2.0 or DirectX 11
  • Storage: 60MB (program and included assets) + 1GB (config and backups)
  • RAM: 2 GB
  • Display: 1280x720
Some emulation cores may have higher processor requirements:
  • ESFMu: 2.0GHz Skylake/Zen, or 2.9GHz Cortex-A76/Snapdragon 845/Apple M1
  • Nuked-OPM and reSID: 3.0GHz Skylake/Zen, or 2.9GHz Cortex-A76/Snapdragon 845/Apple M1
  • reSIDfp: 4.0GHz Skylake/Zen 2, or Cortex-A710/Snapdragon 870/Apple M1
No. There are no plans for this. Furnace is a tracker, and changing the interface would involve a long and painful rewrite.
Furnace keeps backups of the songs you’ve worked on before. Go to File > Restore Backup.

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Workflow

Set the pattern length to a multiple of the number of beats (6 or 5 as mentioned above). Don’t forget to change the row highlight values to match!
There are two common methods:
  1. Delay commands: Use delay commands (EDxx) to offset notes into their correct places. This is good for the occasional set of tuplets, but if you expect to use a lot of them…
  2. Pattern length: Plan ahead for the song to have them by making your pattern length a multiple of that number. Remember to adjust row highlight values to match.
Depending on the tempo of the song, it may only be possible to get perfectly even tuplets by changing the tick rate. Mind that this may hinder playback in games or sound engines that use the vertical blank interval for their timing.
Each chip has its own set of limitations regarding what frequencies it can play. If these limits are likely to be found in normal tracking, they’ll be mentioned in that chip’s documentation.
Not yet, but it’s in the early development stage.
Check whether another application has set these combinations as global hotkeys/shortcuts.If that’s the case, you have two choices:
  • Disable conflicting binds set by other applications, or
  • Bind the non-working key combination to another key or key combination. Go to Settings > Keyboard to do so.
On Linux and other Unix/Unix-like operating systems, KDE Plasma binds Ctrl-F1 to Ctrl-F4 to select virtual desktops by default. This interferes with Furnace’s transpose key combinations.
Open the “Channels” window from the Window > Song menu. See the channel window documentation for details.

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Chips

It’s in the plans, with no target date.Sony PlayStation uses a stereo 24 channel sample-based synthesizer using a custom ADPCM-like format for samples and providing 512 kilobytes of RAM for these.
It also is in the plans, with no target date.The Sega Saturn uses an extremely complicated Yamaha YMF292 sound chip, employing both FM and sample based-synthesis with 32 channels (or rather, FM operators). Each channel can frequency modulate another channel, which lowers the polyphony count according to how many operators are used per voice, with no clear concept of operator routing.
Not directly, as the N64 lacks any form of audio synthesizer chip. Many games use MIDI or XM or other such formats internally, but everything is mixed in software and sent to a simple stereo DAC.This can be simulated with any number of Generic PCM DAC channels at up to 48000 Hz, though realistically these would be limited by processor speed. Most games used around 16 to 24 channels mixed at either 22047 or 32006 Hz with linear interpolation.
Probably not, as with very few exceptions these are effectively all the same.
No. MT-32 is used with MIDI in 99.999% of situations. It lacks a direct register interface.Also, Furnace is not a MIDI tracker…

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Importing

Nope. Furnace is not a MIDI tracker.
Trackers aren’t exactly optimal for MIDI, compared to dedicated MIDI editors. For example:
  • Trackers are designed to only have a single note on/off, not an array of 128 different notes to turn on/off in the same tick and channel.
  • Even if one were to make a new 16-channel system which maps to each MIDI channel, true polyphony in the same channel would still be impossible.
  • Moreover, dynamic channel allocation and handling effect states between channels would get messy very fast.
There are fundamental differences between formats that cannot be directly translated. An import should always be considered the starting point of a conversion, not a final product.
Nope. It’s a feature that’s been requested many times, but there are no plans to implement it. VGM files are raw register dumps, and NSF/KSS/SID files are RAM programs with driver code and song data optimized for said driver. Neither of them translate nicely into a pattern view.
For NSF import, you can use a modified version of FamiTracker called NSFImport and then import the resulting .ftm into Furnace. It’s all speed 1 though, so don’t expect any songs to be nicely laid out with instruments and all.
One way is to use OpenMPT to open the SF2 file, and save WAV files from there. Polyphone is another way.
Use split700 to extract the BRR samples from an SPC. There is presently no way to import envelopes or other parameters.
Extract FM patches from a VGM file using vgm2pre or similar tools like:
Bear in mind that these are only the parameters for the FM synth, and the way the instrument is heard in-game may include pitch bends or other effects that can’t be extracted.
For PSG instruments, see the next question.
PSG chips (such as those in the systems mentioned) don’t have any inherent concept of instruments or patches. All of that is handled in software, and each sound driver has its own way of doing things.Generally, the only option is to recreate the instrument from scratch.

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Exporting

Nope. Furnace is not a MIDI tracker.
Just as Furnace offers a choice of emulation cores, VGM players may use different cores with varying degrees of accuracy. Also, some aspects of a song may not be supported by the VGM format, such as chip clock speeds.
While Furnace did start life as a DMF player, it’s grown in functionality quite a bit, and many Furnace features simply don’t exist in that format. There are also cases where the emulation cores in DefleMask sound different from those available in Furnace.
Each system will need its own method of converting Furnace songs into code that can be played back on hardware. This requires writing a driver for the hardware in question, which is no small task.That having been said, there are several efforts in progress, both for direct export from Furnace itself and external converters such as:
Furnace 0.7 is expected to support exporting ROM for SNES, C64 and Game Boy. There is no ETA for this version.
Yes! See the export documentation for more information.

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Other

If a question isn’t answered within this manual, check in the GitHub Discussions to see if it’s answered there, and post if needed.

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