NextZXOS and alternatives), written by David Saphier and Kev Brady, that can be incorporated into your programs and which not only allow you to play any WAV file stored on SD Card media but also a plethora of digital audio formats.

Currently via NextZXOS you can play natively (you'll see why we explicitly mention it in a second) the following audio file types:

WAV

This is the standard audio format for most computers. The ZX Spectrum Next supports audio resolutions up to 32KHz. In order to playback a digital audio wave file, type:

.wavplay32 file.wav

where file.wav is the audio file you want to play. This can be accessed (like all other NextZXOS dot commands) from the 48K BASIC environment as well and fully incorporated into all your NextBASIC programs. You can find more information on how to access the digital audio hardware of your ZX Spectrum Next in Chapter 22 – IN, OUT and the Next Registers .

MOD

MODule files are one of the major standards for computer music and they comes from the Amiga and its ProTracker application. There are two ways you can play MOD files on the Next. You either use the dot command .nxmod with your selection of .mod file as an argument; for example:

.nxmod song2.mod

or you can use the native application NXModPlayer. This can be found under c:/apps/audio/NxModPlay/ accessible either via the Browser (See relevant section on the Browser in the next Chapter) or via the commands:

 a$ =
      "c:/apps/audio/NxMod/nxmod
      play.nex"
.nexload a$

PT3

PT3 is one of the de-facto standards for AY chip music, and the ZX Spectrum Next supports playback of up to 6 channel audio in two ways. First is via the dot command .playpt3 with the pt3 filename as an argument:

.playpt3 onlyyou.pt3

or via the application NextSID. This is a rather special application as it not only allows you to play back pt3 music files but also to apply SID-like effects to the channels. NextSID can be found under c:/apps/audio/NextSID. As with NXModPlayer above you can either start it via the Browser or via the commands:

  a$="c:/apps/audio/NextSID/nextsid.nex"
.nexload a$

Note that you will need a mouse installed.

Using the Pi accelerator for audio

If you have the Accelerated version of the ZX Spectrum Next, or have a Raspberry Pi Zero installed on your board, then you have more options available audio-wise. These include (but are not limited to) playback of:

• Commodore 64 SID files
• "Tracker" MOD files