Composing Small, for release on 3 1/4 floppy

Some of the ideas in here are pretty cool, but I wanted to point out (if not done already) that mini CD-rs could be packaged quite nicely inside floppies.

Ah yeah, I tried releasing a mini-CDR once, but all the mac laptop users complained that they had to pry the disc out of their CD drives when they tried to play it..

i still wish minidiscs had gotten popular. they're so cool. i love mine.

  On 7/15/2012 at 1:54 AM, JJSee said:

bedroom producers who copypaste a lot of junk with fruity loops.

Oi! I say I resemble that remark

lol

having said that; maybe I'm drunk but I actually really like the idea. Even if fucking no one hears it, you know you managed to make a release on a floppy

that's something few people can say and yes, in itself is more interesting than just releasing mp3s like a lot of the rest of us do

It's completely ridiculous but that's what I love about it

maybe you can just limit the size to 1.44mb and call it a day...

we have so much space these days, so much unused CPU. used to have only a select amount of useful software and expensive as fuck hardware... used to be part of the process to explore these constraints, and now you don't have them all that much anymore, you lose yourself in all the options.

+1 for the minidiscs, I really liked minidisc as well.. used to put my stuff on minidiscs, until I realised it was lossy encoding.

still like md though

I really should find my minidiscs again. I recorded so many IDM jams with friends on them!

Music was released on single 3.5" diskette format back in the tracker scene days a lot. They were simply called "music disks". Well, originally they fitted to single disks (I guess for the reasons of swapping with friends and by mail) but then some got a bit bloated.

Anyway, here's one archive at scene.org. Not all of them are there but you can find more under the groups directory for example. I remember FM's Blur Religion was one of my favorites but it won't fit into a standard 3.5" DOS floppy..

Besides the sample based trackers you could also use AdLib trackers that just save the instrument FM parameters and note data into the file so the tracks will only take few dozen kilobytes each. But FM synthesis is a bitch to use.

  On 7/16/2012 at 5:39 PM, kaini said:

the visualisations in the third one confirmed what i suspected from the first time i encountered #1 - they're basically musical cellular automata. they developed a tool to make them but even with a decent bit of C programming, the UI in the tool is totally impenetrable so i haven't fucked around with it much.

I don't really understand how the sounds are related to cellular automata. The programs are basically just infinite loops in C that put out a byte at each iteration. The sounds have harmonic content because the code uses periodic functions, which is mostly because the byte has values of 0..255 and will loop over when it goes over either 0 or 255 (a kind of modular arithmetic).

So if you just put code in the "putchar(t)" it should create a saw wave, because on each iteration t is added by one and it will loop back to 0 when it goes over 255.

The interesting part is that how such a simple approach can create so varied sound, but you can do kinda similar but more limited things in analog modular gear by having multiple LFOs running simultaneously with different frequencies and waveforms.

This man be talking sense

  On 7/24/2012 at 8:58 AM, mokz said:

Anyway, here's one archive at scene.org. Not all of them are there but you can find more under the groups directory for example. I remember FM's Blur Religion was one of my favorites but it won't fit into a standard 3.5" DOS floppy..

 

Besides the sample based trackers you could also use AdLib trackers that just save the instrument FM parameters and note data into the file so the tracks will only take few dozen kilobytes each. But FM synthesis is a bitch to use.

yea man I remember downloading all the LoK releases back when I was on modem:

http://scene.org/dir.php?dir=%2Fmusic%2Fgroups%2Flok/

first encounter with tracked drum&bass

leadlined breaks, still like that stuff, and I disected that quite a bit in fasttracker... was so happy to have found all that stuff back then:

http://scene.org/file.php?file=%2Fmusic%2Fgroups%2Flok%2Flok_llbk.zip&fileinfo

I actually did my first music in HSC Tracker, an Adlib tracker.. it contained the code for the player so you could integrate it in your own software.. wanted to do intros and games, but never really got to that point. But I wrote some stuff with it that I thought was really cool at the time.. stuff with names like Dungeon Theme, Menu music, Death music etc :)

  On 7/24/2012 at 9:17 AM, mokz said:

  On 7/16/2012 at 5:39 PM, kaini said:

the visualisations in the third one confirmed what i suspected from the first time i encountered #1 - they're basically musical cellular automata. they developed a tool to make them but even with a decent bit of C programming, the UI in the tool is totally impenetrable so i haven't fucked around with it much.

 

I don't really understand how the sounds are related to cellular automata. The programs are basically just infinite loops in C that put out a byte at each iteration. The sounds have harmonic content because the code uses periodic functions, which is mostly because the byte has values of 0..255 and will loop over when it goes over either 0 or 255 (a kind of modular arithmetic).

 

So if you just put code in the "putchar(t)" it should create a saw wave, because on each iteration t is added by one and it will loop back to 0 when it goes over 255.

 

The interesting part is that how such a simple approach can create so varied sound, but you can do kinda similar but more limited things in analog modular gear by having multiple LFOs running simultaneously with different frequencies and waveforms.

if you look at the visualisations, they are almost identical to cellular automata such as rule 30. the bitshift operations and modular arithmetic seem to create a fairly primitive feedback system similar to the ones you see in elementary CAs.

  On 7/25/2012 at 10:57 PM, kaini said:

if you look at the visualisations, they are almost identical to cellular automata such as rule 30. the bitshift operations and modular arithmetic seem to create a fairly primitive feedback system similar to the ones you see in elementary CAs.

Yes, the visualization looks kind of similar, but the programs really only have one state, the integer t, which tells the time (or the sample number) for the waveform calculation. The previous values are not looped back and the waveform value is solely based on the value of t. The programs start with the time t=0, but you could start them at any point by changing the initialization value in the for loop and it will sound the same as if you would fast forward the program to that point and start playing it, so there's no need for the previous states.

(Although you could do the same with CAs with an evolving state since they are Turing complete and everything, but we're sailing off to the theory of computation with that thought.)

But it would be interesting if somebody actually tried to create sounds with CAs, for example using one dimensional CAs (like rule 34) to create the sound spectrum and the convert it to waveform by using Inverse Discrete Fourier Transform in blocks.

  On 7/25/2012 at 1:32 AM, missingsense said:

I actually did my first music in HSC Tracker, an Adlib tracker.. it contained the code for the player so you could integrate it in your own software.. wanted to do intros and games, but never really got to that point. But I wrote some stuff with it that I thought was really cool at the time.. stuff with names like Dungeon Theme, Menu music, Death music etc :)

Yeah, the thought crossed my mind that a dedicated player could be included in the floppy that would have the album art, tailored menus etc. It could be done as a DOS executable so that anybody with a compatible system or an MS-DOS emulator could run it. There are plenty of libraries for DOS to playback tracker music but the problem is that you would need some old school MS-DOS coding skills to create the user interface, for which programming is quite a bit different from modern systems.

The BassMod audio library ( http://www.un4seen.com/bassmod.html ) is only 100kb and is cross-platform compatible: Build yourself a little C++ command line program using the library to play the files and *bam* you're good to go !

(erm, in theory)

was looking up old cracktro's a while ago, maybe interesting.. these are my favs from back then:

+ classic tracker tune

I think those two cracktro's where done with HSC tracker. not 100% sure though.

Ah FastTracker, the thing that kickstarted (properly) my interest in music making - Just watching that video brings back floods of late 90s memories.