new here and have some questions

Hi everyone, I'm new here. Hopefully I'm posting this in the right place! Apologies for the long post, but I have a fair number of questions.

I'm by no means an expert, but I've done some porting for SmW, so I know, musically speaking, how SPC700 music works. I randomly stumbled across FF6 custom music on Youtube, and decided to at least give FF6 porting a shot and see how I take to it. For now, I expect to be more active in the SmW community but I always like trying new things.

I should also probably mention that I am visually impaired and am unable to play most video games. Thus, my experience with romhacking is nonexistent, and will probably stay that way for the near future. The reason I actually took off with SMW porting is because the music insertion tool is standalone enough that someone like me who will never really get into romhacking can still immerse and specialize in the musical side of the process. But the tools available for FF6 seem rather daunting to me because more knowledge about the rom seems to be required. While I understand the basics somewhat, I have trouble putting it together in a way I understand. So please forgive me if I ask stupid questions. BTW if it's more appropriate to discuss this on the Discord, let me know.

I assume I need to use these tools to make ports. Learning the MML syntax shouldn't be much of a problem for me, with a few exceptions, but I feel confident in my ability to work out that bit of the process. Assuming I'm off to a good start so far, here are the things which confuse me at the moment.
1. What's the easiest way to hear the port while you're working on it? In SMW/AddmusicK you can generate spcs which I always do while working on the mml. So is something like this possible with the tools here?
2. (sort of ties into 1) When uploading ports here, you need the data bin file, the instruments bin file and a preview spc at minimum. Perhaps I haven't looked enough for the answer to this one, but how do you generate those from the mml?

3. I know some people use custom samples in their ports. I like making my own samples so I was hoping to do that too, though FF6 has nice stock samples so I'll try to use them too. With SmW it's easy to use custom samples; the amount of samples needed in-game is comparatively small, thus not too many ports need to modify AddmusicK's sample table as SMW and custom samples can often coexist nicely in aram. Those who do need a bit of extra space will kill off some of the less important/used samples and there's now even a list of such samples on smwcentral. So, what's the situation on the samples in fF6 ports?
4. From what I've read, FF6's echo buffer size is fixed. I think the above tools let you change that when patching a rom, but I'm guessing for any ports I create, I shouldn't mess with it since it's a global setting the engine uses, and isn't customizable per song. Just want to confirm that.


If you've made it this far, thank you for reading and for any guidance you can give!