music TIATracker: A new sound routine and sequencer application

[Kylearan]

any hope for a batari player?

I don't know anything about batari and don't have the time to dig deeper, but if someone who knows more tells me what I have to do to add batari support, I'd be happy to do that.

[Vuurniac]

I put this together in my last few days of freedom.

I can make the module available somewhere as well upon request.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

I put this together in my last few days of freedom.

Are you going to marry?

 

BTW: I love those echo effects at the beginning. How do you do those?

Edited September 14, 2016 by Thomas Jentzsch

[Kylearan]

I especially like how you managed to let the varied melody not sound too much off-tune, good work!

[Vuurniac]

Thanks, too bad I couldn't really add those 1-frame noise hihats I wanted because there is no such way to use the overlay percussion feature. I have something in mind that I would do for my own custom engine though, and might be useful or possible to add to TIATracker as well. That would be introducing an 8-bit hi-hat sequencer. Every bit in the byte means whether to play a 1-frame noise (or some other) sound on the current row. This might require another byte of RAM, unless you keep the hi-hat sequence fixed throughout the entire song, in which case it could be part of the song header data in the ROM.

Edited September 14, 2016 by Vuurniac

[MayDay]

Pretty nifty little tool. Being that I don't know much about programming or music really, I was still able to put together a short little loop based on this.

 

TTT file - tried to upload, says that I'm not allowed to add that file type.

Loopable MP3 version - attached.

 

It took me a while to figure out kind of what I was doing. I still don't really understand how to set up percussion instruments either. I'm afraid adding it to the same track as the other instruments is above my head as well, although the guide did a good job of explaining how to make that work.

Code of Honor Loop.mp3

Edited January 15, 2017 by MayDay

[Kylearan]

New version 1.2 released:

• Added an option that allows patterns to have different tempo values. While using this option costs some extra bytes in the VCS player routine, it can help to make shorter patterns and thus save bytes overall.
• Added a keyboard shortcut for "Insert pattern after..." action
• On export, the tracker now checks if goto commands are valid. The target of a goto command has to be <128, and for targets in channel 1, the number of patterns in channel 0 gets added to the target number. This constraint is due to size optimizations in the VCS player routine.
• Added two new example songs by Glafouk: A Bomb the Bass Megablast remix called "Miniblast" and a song called "Beside", both from Flush's demo "rotor" (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=68494)
• Minor UI fixes

I've edited the first post with the new downloads. Enjoy!

[Oscillating]

So you write tracks on pc and then how exactly do you get it to something like a harmony cart to play back on a real world machine?

[MayDay]

Once you have created your composition, you can export that to code. That code can be assembled into a binary which can then be played back on an emulator or harmony cart. You can also use the playback feature within the app to hear what it would sound like.

[Kylearan]

So you write tracks on pc and then how exactly do you get it to something like a harmony cart to play back on a real world machine?

 

Use "Export complete player to dasm..." in the menu to generate several .asm files. Then use dasm to compile <songname>_player_framework.asm to a .bin file you can then open in Stella or put on a harmony cart.

 

See also Section 5.1 in the manual for a more thorough explanation, including how to compile the .asm files using dasm.

[+playsoft]

Does anyone have any TIATracker music I could use in a very simple dance game? Attached is a silent version, but it really needs music to work. With music it would be bank switched, so a 4K bank would be available for the music data.

[Kylearan]

Does anyone have any TIATracker music I could use in a very simple dance game? Attached is a silent version, but it really needs music to work. With music it would be bank switched, so a 4K bank would be available for the music data.

 

I know several musicians who use TIATracker, some of them are quite productive actually. I'll PM you contact information.

[+playsoft]

 

I know several musicians who use TIATracker, some of them are quite productive actually. I'll PM you contact information.

 

Thank you

[Kylearan]

New version 1.3 released:

• Fix: In some circumstances the tracker used to crash when the right channel was longer than the left
• Fix: In the "Export..." file dialog, the cancel button was sometimes ignored
• Added export to MADS assembler
• Added WUDSN IDE meta comments to dasm and MADS player sources
• Turned on full compiler optimization, hopefully mitigating some problems on slower systems

I've edited the first post with the new downloads. Enjoy!

[Jinroh]

Great tool, excited to try it! I wrote a Carrot Anthem for Carrot Kingdom to potentially add some music to the game.

 

Looking forward to transcribing that from my SY99 synthesizer to TIA Tracker.

[Kylearan]

Glad you like it! Ping me if you need help or specific features. Having TIATracker get used in a game would be awesome.

Edited August 3, 2017 by Kylearan

[MemberAtarian]

I have searched for a connection to glafouk, but I can see he is not a member here. Is there any way to connect to him? I would like to ask for some permits.

[Kylearan]

I have searched for a connection to glafouk, but I can see he is not a member here. Is there any way to connect to him? I would like to ask for some permits.

 

I'll PM you his contact info.

[ClausB]

Cool stuff!

 

Has anyone tried dithering between adjacent frequencies to get more in tune notes? Would it sound like vibrato?

 

Also could this tracker be adapted to POKEY? Or is there already one for that?

Edited November 4, 2017 by ClausB

[Thomas Jentzsch]

That only sounds OK if you update multiple times per frame. The more the better.

[Kylearan]

Has anyone tried dithering between adjacent frequencies to get more in tune notes? Would it sound like vibrato?

As Thomas has said, you'd have to do it multiple times per frame, the more the better. So for a pure music cartridge that would be possible, but for a game or a demo, where you need the CPU cycles for your display kernel, this would be difficult (and more importantly, very specific to the display kernel). And since TIATracker is aimed mainly for music in games or demos, I decided not to support this.

 

Apart from that, a musician told me that changing parameters multiple times per frame makes a big difference for sound quality only if you'd have more parameters like filters anyway, which we don't have on the VCS.

 

Also could this tracker be adapted to POKEY? Or is there already one for that?

I have no idea about POKEY, but a quick Google search tells me there are trackers for that already.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

As Thomas has said, you'd have to do it multiple times per frame, the more the better.

I needed a continuous frequency change for the siren sound in Star Castle Arcade. So have used frequency dither (4 times/frame) there.

 

IMO it sounds OK, I think 4 updates/frame are about the minimum required.

[Fragmare]

I'm having some troubles exporting to DASM in TIATracker. I use export>dasm>export player + dasm, and I keep getting the error message 'Unable to find player/dasm/tt_variables.asm'. Funny thing is... tt_variables.asm is, in fact, in the folder, and has not been modified since installing the tracker. I'm using Win10 64bit if that helps. Anybody else experience this?

Really, I just need to render a .bin file, so I can record the audio to .wav in an emulator... that's the end goal here.

 

Never mind... it seems that closing and re-opening the program fixed this.

 

 

Any plans to include an 'Export to WAV File' option in a future release?

Edited November 16, 2017 by Fragmare

[Kylearan]

The problem you described appears when the current working directory is not the same as the TIATracker executable when starting the program. This can happen for example if you have linked the .ttt file extension to TIATracker in Windows and start the program by double-clicking a .ttt file (which right now TIATracker doesn't support anyway).

 

This is a known (and admittedly quite silly) problem which I haven't found the time to fix yet, sorry!

 

Any plans to include an 'Export to WAV File' option in a future release?

As I wouldn't know how to do that, probably not. I believe there should already be tools to capture WAV from your soundcard.

[Fragmare]

The problem you described appears when the current working directory is not the same as the TIATracker executable when starting the program. This can happen for example if you have linked the .ttt file extension to TIATracker in Windows and start the program by double-clicking a .ttt file (which right now TIATracker doesn't support anyway).

 

This is a known (and admittedly quite silly) problem which I haven't found the time to fix yet, sorry!

 

As I wouldn't know how to do that, probably not. I believe there should already be tools to capture WAV from your soundcard.

 

I see, no worries... nothing a little close and reopen didn't fix. Wonderful tracker, btw. Pretty intuitive and feature rich for just being released last year.

 

Yea, of course there is Fraps and Audacity for recording whatever is playing.

 

I think the real problem here is the speed of my computer lol... I don't get very good playback from within TIATracker itself (the timing sounds off somehow and the beginning tick or so of some instruments seems to get cut off), again probably due to the fact my computer is a potato. However, if i Export to DASM then assemble that into a .BIN, it plays perfectly in Stella and Bizhawk (which also support WAV logging). When creating new instruments and sequencing stuff like percussion, the first tick or so getting cut off can totally change the way it sounds, so that necessitates a LOT of going back and forth between TIATracker and Stella/Bizhawk to get the sound I like. Here is an example of what I'm talking about... this is supposed to be the percussion and bassline for a track I'm working on. The first link is what I hear coming out of Stella and Bizhawk. The second is what I hear coming out of TIATracker when hit play.

 

https://instaud.io/1rzR

 

https://instaud.io/1rzS

 

I'll attach the .BIN and .TTT files too

 

Maybe adding an option to increse the sound buffer of the tracker's emulation core might help this? Any ideas of stuff I could try on my end?

devil.bin

Devils_Crush_Bassline_Drums01a.zip