Question about IT stereo samples in ModPlug-compatible trackers and players

[Katie Cadet]

Hi, I'm new to the OpenMPT Forums and I've just wanted to know If an IT-Compatible tracker can support stereo samples. You know, like when I used stereo samples in ModPlug Tracker 1.16 back in Early 2010? As I was looking at the help file it said that in ModPlug Tracker (The precursor of OpenMPT) 1.11 is the first tracker to include a compatible hack called stereo samples. This was brought in later versions of OpenMPT, ModPlug Player, ModPlug Tracker, Schism Tracker, ChibiTracker, XMPlay, and BeRoTracker that supported stereo samples as cross-platform trackers and players as of now that I've used on Windows 7 SP1 64-BIT and Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks. Is it compatible with these cross-platform trackers that supported stereo samples rather than OpenMPT? P.S. Schism Tracker can go further adding more samples from H0 to FF (I think) as it does in OpenMPT so it is an MPT hack not based on the IT-Specifications to me.

[Saga Musix]

Even though Impulse Tracker never supported stereo samples, the way stereo samples should be stored was defined in ITTECH.TXT, and this way is guaranteed to be backwards-compatible, i.e. a stereo sample plays just fine in a tracker or player that can only handle mono samples (because it will simply play the left channel in those applications). Thus, this is not an MPT hack (MPT was merely the first application to make full use of the original IT specification), and all applications handle it the very same way.
Compressed stereo samples are a slightly different story, since most players don't support those at all, meaning that they will also just load the left channel in most cases.

Having more than 99 samples or instruments in an IT file is indeed an MPT hack, and to the best of my knowledge Schism doesn't "support" this in the way that you can actively add more than 99 samples in it, but it can play such files just fine.