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Newcastle, UK

It's here!

Blurb:

ChipdiscoDJ is a twin-deck MOD/XM/S3M player, set up like DJ software and with many of the same features. Needless to say, because modules are much better than MP3s, WAVs and other rendered audio files, you can do very cool stuff by digging into the notes as they’re calculated and played on the fly by the player engine. Adjust speed without adjusting pitch! Change pitch without altering speed! Mute individual instruments or channels! Trigger sub-pattern loops (a la Ableton Live) with pinpoint timing accuracy! Also, because modules are usually very small, you can roll up to a party with ChipdiscoDJ and a bunch of tunes on a floppy disk and kill that shit dead. No floppies? Don’t worry – you can queue up files from other websites by copying the URLs. Aaaawesome.

For those already familiar with Chipdisco, v0.21 represents a slight crawl forward in terms of features but a gargantuan, chasm-spanning leap forward in terms of stability and reliability – even though it’s still done in Java!  It also looks a hell of a lot prettier now, and I think it’s sort of found itself visually after all this time (though there’s still scope for refinement…)


Feedback most welcome, either here or in the blogpost comments. It seems to work well on Windows and Linux (as long as Java is installed, natch) and - as usual - there are some problems with MacOS...but I'm working on them. Bugreports from Mac users are particularly welcome at the moment.

Cheers!

Last edited by syphus (Dec 11, 2010 5:19 pm)

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This is exactly what I have been looking for my monthly show on sub.fm

words cant explain how much I love you for this!

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BOSTON

wow this sounds amazing

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Newcastle, UK

Flopps - cool! I'll be interested to hear how you get on. If you need any tweaks made, or have suggestions for improvements after using it in a real-life situation, just let me know smile

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one thing I think might be a cool feature is if you could have some sort of "advance track" view where it displays the channels individually with a audio spectrum visualiser type thing (I hope I explained that well) so you would be able to mute them accordingly

Last edited by Flopps (Dec 6, 2010 11:30 am)

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Vancouver, BC

Looks great!

Reading this made me realize that PortaMod exists...
I am totally going to try out PortaMod since I have a Processing tracker project on the go.
Are the OS X problems you mentioned present in PortaMod or just the full ChipdiscoDJ?

Oh, and syphus, your tracks are so catchy that when I read your username I get one of them instantly stuck in my head. I think this time it was 'better days'.
It's a bit much actually!!
smile

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Newcastle, UK

Cheers spriteful! Interested to hear about your Processing tracker. Doing a tracker in Processing (or anything, come to that) is a biiiig job and I'm only about 20% through one of my own (even with PortaMod's help) but it would also be the coolest thing in the world to see come to fruition. Having said that, I realise it'd be much easier to do a custom-format synthtracker than an XM/S3M/MOD tracker, but I'm apparently a masochist wink

OSX probs - the ones I was referring to have been fixed and although we discovered some new ones, I'm working on those too. I'll check PortaMod to make sure the same problems don't exist there and I'll upload a fix if they do [edit - no, I checked and PortaMod doesn't have the same problem smile ]. The problems are about getting secondary/multiple AudioLines from javasound - some people can get two decks but no cue mixes, some people can only get one deck...we'll see smile

Flopps - hmm, I mostly get what you're saying, I think. Earlier versions of ChipdiscoDJ had full tracker notedata display (possibly not what you're talking about) and this version does have channel muting. I realise that's not so helpful unless you can see what's happening in the channels; the coloured blocks show channel note hits and it's possible to show channel note volume, but harder to show a spectrum-like display for each channel. That stuff only gets calculated in the mixing engine, and only for all channels at once. But I'll play around with some means of representing channels a bit better smile In the meantime, the first four channels of each module can have their mute status toggled with keys (1-4, 5-8) or MIDI.

Last edited by syphus (Dec 6, 2010 12:36 pm)

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☺☺☺

This is really great, ive been using maxmod up until now for djsets, this way i wont need a devcart!

One feature I would love to see is so form of tempo jog buttons near the tempo slider that only increment +/- 1 BPM, so you can zone in on the mix a bit better

Although its pretty radical as it stands, thanks for making it!

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Newcastle, UK

Yes, I absolutely recognise the need for that smile Actually, +/- keys and Shift with +/- leys used to control +/-1 BPM...I think I disabled them during the overhaul and forgot to put them back in. I shall do so! And maybe I'll complement them with some nice +/- buttons on the GUI too...

I hadn't heard of maxmod before - looks interesting, thanks for the heads-up.

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☺☺☺

Ooh one more thing as im sipping my coffee....

screen resolution options maybe? I just realized looking at screenshots that im missing Deck Bs controls tongue

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Newcastle, UK

Aaaah...that's a tricky one. A Processing limitation; Processing's really rubbish at screen resolution stuff, particularly changing applet dimensions after the applet's started running. There are some hacks and tricks, but they're not very portable and can cause other problems. I'll maybe just make things thinner and try to squeeze it at least to 1024 width, which most systems (even my current netbook) can manage.

What's your resolution, by the way?

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☺☺☺

yea my main monitor is 1024x768


.....i do have a 22 inch crt out in the garage however for the time being tongue

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Geneva, NY

/me pleased to see syphus up in this bitch

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Spokompton

whoa I'm so frigging stoked to try this when I get home...!!!

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Joliette, QC, Canada

Wow ! Saw this on TCTD earlier and played a little bit with it...this is really cool and now I dont need to export my mods in mp3 to do some DJing !
Thumbs up Syphus ! big_smile

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Newcastle, UK

Cheers all!

Updates: I've fixed the fonts, I've generally overhauled and improved the GUI, I've reduced the width to 1024px (netbook-friendly!), added BPM fine-tune buttons and on-screen transpose (pitch) controls AND fixed the OSX/Linux hanging issue when choosing cue-mix device.

Emar - good suggestions, cheers! I should say, though, don't hope to get pinpoint-accurate beatmatching with this. Actually, you *can* beatmatch, but not if you use the cue-mix, as there's a slight lag when the cue-mix is sent back to the main outputs. Which defeats the whole object of the cue-mix tongue Maybe I'll be able to fix it one day... Let me know if you do a DJ set with it, anyway smile