Hi y'all,

My new "chiptune audio workstation" is coming along nicely (linky

), and I expect I'll have more to show in the coming months, so let's do a dev thread for this.

For now, here's a little sneak preview

of things to come. Stay tuned :)

hype!
this looks so cool. im really looking forward to future updates!

Yooo, looks cool

is it in the irrlicht engine?
get it

it looks great. It must be a tough task to work on this beast!

Cheers y'all ;)

garvalf, it's very tough indeed. After Houstontracker and the first Bintracker prototype I though I had a somewhat realistic idea about what I was getting myself into. Well, as it turns out, I didn't. But if I had, I probably wouldn't have started in the first place :D

I hope that unlike most trackers, it'll be azerty-friendly :)

Edit: that shift feature while editing notes is a great idea!

There'll definitely be azerty support. Though I think it'll take some time to work out what exactly that entails. For example, when entering numerical data in a tracker, do you want use the Shift key or would you expect Bintracker to "do the right thing" and interpret keypresses on the upper row as numbers regardless of Shift modifiers? The latter would be nice to have methinks, but it's quite a rabbit hole to implement it. Anyway, all the keybindings are reconfigurable so generally things should be fine pour les francophones.

Well the most important is that during note editing the keyboard acts like a 2-row piano keyboard, having the key A print a C instead of the Q on a qwerty keyboard etc. The shift issue can often be sorted out with Caps Lock I guess, but the rest of the differing keys (A, Z, Q, W, M and the punctuation keys) really break the workflow when they put out an unexpected note... Don't know if I'm clear!

its like qwertz, where A4 and C3 are always switched and its annoying af lol

Swapping a few letter keys for notes is no problem. The thing with azerty is that it has also some more "esoteric" features, such as the usage of Shift to access the numbers on the number row. There are apparantly also two different versions, a "wide" and a "narrow" layout which swap some keys around. garvalf was helping me with this back in the days of prototype bintracker, but I don't think we managed to reach a solution that we were completely satisfied with.

what do you want to use the numbers for besides notes?

Effects, patterns numbers, and so on... pretty much anything that isn't a note, trigger, string, or "key command" (the latter are basically sets of named values, notes being one incarnation of those).

i just use the keypad to enter numbers, i guess the numbers of the top row are there only because that's where they were on typewriters.

With a numpad you should be fine. However, many laptops nowaday don't have one. Either way, I think it's ultimately up to the users to decide what works best for them. If it turns out the majority are unhappy with the default keybindings that Bintracker will ship with, then that can always be improved. At this point I'm pretty much implementing my personal vision of what a next-gen chip editor should be like, but the idea is to ultimately put this tool into the hands of the community, so the community will have a say in where the journey goes.

Hi y'all, just released the source code!

A little commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4-UPkJl4V4

If you're feeling lucky and want to check out Bintracker in all its pre-alpha glory, here's the code

and here are the build instructions

.

Only 12 hours left to compile Bintracker, and create an entry for the Corporate Music Battle!

sad seeing that the code is hosted at pithub... :( - it became "defunct" because their newer micosoft "politics" - i hurried leaving pithub as soon as it got acquired by micosoft...

I'm not exactly happy with Microsoft-owned Github either. But really, relying on any commercial service is a liability for a project like this. In the end it doesn't matter that much who owns that service. Just look at Gitlab, their moral standards might be even lower than Microsoft's.

The best would be to self-host, but since I'm chronically short on money that's not an option for me at this point. So if I'm going to use a 3rd party service, I might as well chose the most popular one, because that'll lower the bar for people to contribute (since chances are that people who are interested already have a gh account).

That said, on the long run I would very much want to have a more robust solution which minimizes the risk of vendor lock-in and makes things more accessible for people who avoid gh. I'm thinking at least a repo mirror on Gitlab, plus other mirrors on people's private servers. This kind of devops thing isn't really my thing though so any help with this is moe than welcome.

my main concern about pithub is that some project developers enjoy centralizing everything there (like Godot engine developers sadly does) - there are projects even worse, that we can't have any clue how to contact them to report bugs or suggest features elsewhere, which situation blocks me out totally - for project hosting myself, i confess i'm still using gitlab as main git host, but i keep backups of that at bitbucket and notabug (i'm quite enjoying this last one), and of course this priority will change as soon i feel some stench coming from there, or even closing if the stench would be a strong as from pithub