merging lsdj songs into a single song (Page 2 of 3)

Just for reference, I just did this manually. It was obnoxious and time consuming and has side effects. If these had been anything short of raw, thinly constructed ideas, this would have been all but impossible.

First I deep cloned all the chains in one of my ideas until the numbers were well out of the range of anything in the second idea.

Then I did the same for all the instruments, which was a real hassle.

Then I started pasting everything in - the song sequence was easy, but then each chain and pattern had to be pasted manually. In retrospect I would have done instruments first, because any phrase with samples needed its instrument in place in order to paste correctly.

Luckily they were raw enough that I had hardly used tables, grooves, synths etc yet or it would have been a fucking nightmare, and therein lies the difficulty in coding a piece of software to do the job, of course.

As an unfortunate side effect, LSDJ doesn't seem to recognize that many of the pasted in phrases are actually full, and brings them up happily when I select-A-A to get a new phrase, so you have to be careful.

All in all, it probably took only slightly less time than actually just rebuilding the goddamn song by hand, looking at it on a second gameboy.

quick, someone write a script that compiles .lsdsong to MML, and then someone else write a script that compiles MML to .lsdsong

Well, mainly in response to that yahoo group:
What I used to do live, and i'm sure many of you do the same, is to duplicate an lsdj cart and sync them.
So when writing a song I structure it with live mode in mind, i.e. seperated percussion and melody intros; a main 'body' and end it all with separated melody and percussion outros.
so a song transition would involve
1)reaching the outro of song 1
2)cancelling melody in song 1, but let percussion carry on
3)simultaneously start the melody of song 2, let that loop
4)cancel the percussion of song 1
5)and start the percussion of song 2
6) load up song 3 while song 2's body is playing & repeat.

*if i knew a song was in the same key, sometimes i'd do it with the bass too.

Last edited by Shriker (Mar 3, 2011 9:42 am)

I had some vague ideas a while ago making a pc application that could do something similar. Also being able to save instruments separately etc. Never found the time to get around doing it though. I think I came as far as mapping up how the .sav file is laid out.

I pictured it as a separate application that would re-map phrases, chains, instruments, etc so that stuff didn't overlap. If memory wasn't enough for both songs you would just get an error message when trying to merge. It wouldn't be too hard to accomplish. The application could even be able to check if an instrument in Song A is has the exact same settings as one in Song B and map all usages of it to the first one in order to save memory. You'd loose the instrument name though.

I asked Johan for that on the mail list some years ago. Didn't win any interest unfortunately.

I'd like to start working on this in my spare time. Can you share some of your knowledge about the sav format? That's the only thing slowing me down. No documentation for it. I actually have found some c code that parses the sav file, but I'd like to know as much as possible.

It seems goatslacker has started a project for converting from the lsdj sav file to xml. http://code.google.com/p/lsdj2xml/. I haven't compiled it yet, but it looks legit. Pretty handy. Apparently his idea was to make a program that would open a sav file, extract a song from it, and allow the user to save individual instrument files. Something like that.

It would be great to have a program that would extract an instrument from a song, and upload it to a big database.

The limitation on total number of Tables per song would really need to be upped for it to be of use to me.

And what happens if you have the same parameters in both songs (i.e. - same instrument/table/noise pattern in both songs)? Wouldn't the paste function need to be intelligent to match variables so that you don't clone just to double on the same data?

(skimmed thread)