65

(9 replies, posted in Other Hardware)

What is 1-bit music?

(since I've originally posted this on an arduino forum, I made an introduction to 1-bit music, I assume most people here knows about this, but I've kept the introduction anyway, "just in case"...)

It's music made from the speaker of a computer (no dedicated sound card), the state of the speaker can be 0 or 1. Generally it sounds very crude, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IOL4q5tDDQ (which can be cool too, this tune is so great)

But since the 80's it was possible to get a better sound through dedicated sound engines, made in assembly code, especially on the ZX Spectrum beeper (intro music for some game, it used so much CPU that is was not possible to have in-game music, remember, on ZX 48 there was no sound card):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRUQr457zkw (game is from 1987)


I've seen some 1-bit music project on Arduino, but none had gone very far. Until now!

Shiru, the grand-master of 1-bit music on ZX Spectrum, has ported two of his engines on Arduino, from z80 ASM to Arduino in C. And it sounds pretty cool!

Here are the links to these 2 threads on our 1-bit music forum:
http://randomflux.info/1bit/viewtopic.php?pid=1154
http://randomflux.info/1bit/viewtopic.php?pid=1155

you can just download the arduino code, plug an old PC speaker or buzzer on PIN7 and GND of your Arduino, and you'll get great music!


You can of course make your own music with some dedicated trackers, and convert it to play on your arduino!

Here is a link to a quick recording I made with one of the engine:
http://picosong.com/GFmm/

remember, it's not sampled music, it's generated in 1-bit from the arduino itself!

the original poster highjacked 4 different threads to expose his problem. We've already answered in one of them:

http://chipmusic.org/forums/topic/16167 … re/page/2/

and he didn't even bother answer to this one. Yeah, it should work. It works for me at least.

67

(5 replies, posted in Releases)

it sounds cool, I like this and the dark aspect of it of course smile

email sent as well.

could it be the vapor alone from the glue, even if the glue didn't even touch the screen?

70

(257 replies, posted in Software & Plug-ins)

It should be possible to build it on OSX: picoloop is using rtaudio, which can manage all OS (so on OSX CoreAudio instead of Alsa). If you can modify the makefile it should do the job (I haven't tried yet).

+1 bryface.
Ok for using ssl (my CM.O account is so precious I wouldn't have it stolen), but before that I think it'd be wiser to focus developements on using html5 replay.

72

(257 replies, posted in Software & Plug-ins)

talking about ideas, I have a few as well wink

- There could be a simple text configuration file in the picoloop folder, which could store the default:
* palette
* current bank
* audiooutput channel, midi and such and just preload them in the first picoloop screen, so it'd be faster to start up
* it could also hold the DUMP_AUDIO variable for recording or not the audio into a wav file

- The tempo should be stored into the bank. (I mean, 1 tempo for 1 bank). Even if it's not possible to change tempo during a song, it would be easier to have the correct tempos when we reload a new song. At the moment I have a text file with the tempo correspondances, to remember them, for example:
bank 3 : tempo 140
bank 7 : tempo 105 etc

- It'd be nice to be able to store wav files of individual tracks, instead of having them already mixed. So we could use post production on individual tracks (for example to boost the drums etc). The could be a DUMP_AUDIO_MULTI variable which would output to audioout0.wav, audioout1.wav, audioout2.wav and audioout3.wav instead of just audioout.wav

thank you, it looks very interesting!

74

(5 replies, posted in Releases)

It's very enjoyable to listen to this. Good catch, thank you!

that's always great!

The most user friendly software you can use is "Vortex Tracker II" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_36Rixs9eo
It works well with Wine on Linux.

There is also Arkos Tracker for windows. It works with Wine but require some tricks to make it work correctly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hJWGk5meIk
(btw listen to this wonder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C8DmOL6l_A )

There are also a couple of cool native software you can use with Atari ST emulators, like MaxYMiser or Defmon (they won't create AY or YM files, but SNDH which are tied to the atari st capacities)

You can have a look at my trackers comparison chart: http://garvalf.online.fr/index.php?page … s_trackers

Nice! Happy new year too!

a late answer, but I've just remembered I forgot to answer to this one... You don't need to solder a real midi port, just scavenge an old midi cable and you can do something with that...

Sorry kometbomb, I was talking to @Draggs Connor and your message arrived in between! smile
First I thought mavericks was an Ubuntu variant, then I remembered after I compiled it on Linux that it was Mac OS X. I've given away my binary anyway.

I got a black window too with the windows binary, with wine on linux, and this error:

wine: cannot find L"C:\\windows\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v4.0.30319\\mscorsvw.exe"

But I don't bother much with this because I prefer a native binary smile

I had a working Mac OS X virtual machine, but the file got corrupt after a disk crash so I can't use it anymore at the moment. For Draggs Connor, you could try to install libsdl2-image-dev and libsdl2-mixer-dev with a tool such as brew ( http://brew.sh/ ), and you should be able to compile Klystrack this way.

Can't you compile it?
https://github.com/kometbomb/klystrack/ … wToCompile

I've just compiled it on Linux Mint, here is a binary for x64: http://dl.free.fr/hXtWwrpRA (for 30 days)

Thank you @kometbomb!