This program doesn't look top down to me, it seems like the main sequencing interface is piano roll, although the sample editing looks tracker-inspired. It'll be interesting to see what people do with it. Maybe fans of piano roll will find a lightweight way to get their ideas down that feels simpler than a full Ableton setup?
For me I still find piano roll awkward to read. I can't visualize what the music is going to sound like the way I can with a tracker pattern. Perhaps it's because my eyes need to scan left and right and up and down too much to see what each note is? Let's not even get into the problem of having effects configured on a totally different screen. When I transitioned from tracker to hardware and later to Ableton I felt like I wasn't really writing music any more, I was just rearranging sounds till they eventually turned into music. It made for perhaps more surprising and interesting results, but I never really got back the feeling of control and finesse that I had with trackers.
I bought playerpro and we used it for a while, been a long time since I thought of it. I just checked my old Mac CD case and it's not in there, oh well. We also switched to reason around version 3-5.
at the very least, you've made up my mind that i need to photograph every 4 disc page in all of my cases, and label the cases. Right now it's like "MissingHandleCase" and "RightLockBrokenCase" and "LocksIntactWithStrapCase" and "LargestUnderBedCase"!
I do have discs from that era, as i have 680x0 Mac Performa OS discs - the ones that are silver and black with pixel / icon art of the mac smiley face on them. When i still had an actual SATA optical drive on a machine i was contemplating indexing all of my optical media. I started with some software on windows and it wasn't very good, i looked around for other options and came up with nothing. So i rely on my (admittedly non-perfect) memory of what i had on disc, up to ~30 years ago.
I may as well admit: I tried to "patent" an optical media "case" that mechanically held the middle of the disc, like a laptop cdrom spindle does, but with a button to release them so you didn't need to "bend" the disc to remove it. I had cad drawings and everything. But the vaultz cases are "good enough" for my usage - where i rarely, if ever, remove discs from their sleeves. As long as the cases aren't jostled regularly, and never left open and exposed to dust, and kept in a controlled environment (not too hot, not too cold, not too wet, not too dry), i don't forsee any issues from the storage of the discs. Whether or not the foil layer or glue or any of that holds up - well, my optical disc case design was actually gasket sealed, and had something like a Schraeder valve to pump air out, or nitrogen in; this probably would have made the foil and glue last longer.
I had completely forgotten i had invented that until i started commenting on the longevity of my optical media. Sorry. Amateur archivist, here. Nice to meet you.
obviously i've seen it, but i never wrote anything in it, it makes my eyes hurt. I still use modplug tracker / openMPT (openmpt.org, funded until 2032!), and taught my youngest how to open and play songs with it, and i have a lot of files it can open. thousands.
It's interesting a lot of us saw this and thought "Tracker" and I googled to see if there was a TUI tracker, and on simple search I don't see one. It seems like that's an interesting idea waiting to be made...
I think I wouldn't hate a modal tracker nowadays. In the old days when everyone had gigantic keyboards it didn't seem so bad to depend on numpad and F keys and so on, but nowadays it might be cleaner to be more vim-like.
There's demo video at https://v.basspistol.org/w/eUCnnNJugRZ5haqyuYQ2CK
In case anyone else wondered, it doesn't seem to involve Tek (Tektronix) terminal graphics. Maybe the name was an homage?
Oh no, you're supposed to have the channels on the x-axis and time on the y-axis ;) mutters about good old days
Neat! For those who prefer a more direct, terminal-based approach to making music with code, check out also Glicol-CLI:
https://github.com/glicol/glicol-cli
I love the top down tracker UI. For some more you can look at Aphex Twin using PlayerPRO [0] and Hitori Tori using Renoise [1]
[0] https://vimeo.com/223378825
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnJY5u6cC7A
Both are mindblowing.
This program doesn't look top down to me, it seems like the main sequencing interface is piano roll, although the sample editing looks tracker-inspired. It'll be interesting to see what people do with it. Maybe fans of piano roll will find a lightweight way to get their ideas down that feels simpler than a full Ableton setup?
For me I still find piano roll awkward to read. I can't visualize what the music is going to sound like the way I can with a tracker pattern. Perhaps it's because my eyes need to scan left and right and up and down too much to see what each note is? Let's not even get into the problem of having effects configured on a totally different screen. When I transitioned from tracker to hardware and later to Ableton I felt like I wasn't really writing music any more, I was just rearranging sounds till they eventually turned into music. It made for perhaps more surprising and interesting results, but I never really got back the feeling of control and finesse that I had with trackers.
I bought playerpro and we used it for a while, been a long time since I thought of it. I just checked my old Mac CD case and it's not in there, oh well. We also switched to reason around version 3-5.
It's open-source now, but never made the transition to 64-bit APIs.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/playerpro/
If you ever do find that disc I'd love to buy it from you lol.
at the very least, you've made up my mind that i need to photograph every 4 disc page in all of my cases, and label the cases. Right now it's like "MissingHandleCase" and "RightLockBrokenCase" and "LocksIntactWithStrapCase" and "LargestUnderBedCase"!
I do have discs from that era, as i have 680x0 Mac Performa OS discs - the ones that are silver and black with pixel / icon art of the mac smiley face on them. When i still had an actual SATA optical drive on a machine i was contemplating indexing all of my optical media. I started with some software on windows and it wasn't very good, i looked around for other options and came up with nothing. So i rely on my (admittedly non-perfect) memory of what i had on disc, up to ~30 years ago.
I may as well admit: I tried to "patent" an optical media "case" that mechanically held the middle of the disc, like a laptop cdrom spindle does, but with a button to release them so you didn't need to "bend" the disc to remove it. I had cad drawings and everything. But the vaultz cases are "good enough" for my usage - where i rarely, if ever, remove discs from their sleeves. As long as the cases aren't jostled regularly, and never left open and exposed to dust, and kept in a controlled environment (not too hot, not too cold, not too wet, not too dry), i don't forsee any issues from the storage of the discs. Whether or not the foil layer or glue or any of that holds up - well, my optical disc case design was actually gasket sealed, and had something like a Schraeder valve to pump air out, or nitrogen in; this probably would have made the foil and glue last longer.
I had completely forgotten i had invented that until i started commenting on the longevity of my optical media. Sorry. Amateur archivist, here. Nice to meet you.
Well now I need one. I used PlayerPro even before I started experimenting with the terminal based trackers (FastTracker, etc).
It’s so weird, but I can still see an image of the tracker screen from a specific time in my life, and feel echoes of the way it made me feel.
have you ever seen/used paragon 5 gameboy tracker? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiy5dEgV9-s
obviously i've seen it, but i never wrote anything in it, it makes my eyes hurt. I still use modplug tracker / openMPT (openmpt.org, funded until 2032!), and taught my youngest how to open and play songs with it, and i have a lot of files it can open. thousands.
nit: Renoise; good stuff, thanks for sharing.
Really awesome UI. Is there a quick YouTube demo?
Was hoping to see a tracker, I think that would be a better fit for the terminal
It's interesting a lot of us saw this and thought "Tracker" and I googled to see if there was a TUI tracker, and on simple search I don't see one. It seems like that's an interesting idea waiting to be made...
This title makes me desire a hardware 24 bit unicode terminal.
Are there any DAWs that support VIM keybinds?
I remember seeing one a while ago, and a quick websearch leads me to this Reaper plugin: https://github.com/gwatcha/reaper-keys
I think I wouldn't hate a modal tracker nowadays. In the old days when everyone had gigantic keyboards it didn't seem so bad to depend on numpad and F keys and so on, but nowadays it might be cleaner to be more vim-like.
the binary is kind of broken, output is quite cryptic:
Error: ClientError(ClientStatus(FAILURE | SERVER_FAILED))
For the non-arch users, the build script has a typo:
Don't use bin/, use build/
The AUR package is also broken, it doesn't fetch the submodule before trying to build.
It would be better to just suggest using the static build, as it works OotB.
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