I'm going to give this a proper name eventually, I'm just not sure what yet. This is going to be a curses-based tracker-style sequencer with built-in instruments and effects.
Here's what it can do audio-wise right now. It has algorithms for rendering various curves you can describe with a li'l DSL—namely, curves going from one point to another at varying rates, sinusoids, and a series-based interface for making band-limited wavetables which you can use for wavetable synthesis. You can seek through these curves/tables using linear interpolation with various sticking or looping modes. There's also a very rough delay that needs various refinements which I slapped together rapidly out of raw desperation a few hours ago. For pitch, it understands notes in 53-EDO, including fractional notes, and supports basic arithmetic on them. It also has a sense of time, both in fractional terms and as discrete ticks. It can output audio via SDL.
Its coolest graphical feature so far is probably that it can plot any of the curves/tables using the curses character set at whichever width and height you choose. In the current state of the program, it uses this facility to highlight which of two wavetables is currently driving the wavetable synthesizer as it plays music using the above-described audio features. In the background you can see it render a pretend musical score, and in the top left corner you can see a "cursor pulse" effect which I'm planning to use to highlight the current-and-recently-played rows when I get score-based playback working.
I mainly wanted to commit and upload the code somewhere now because I'm extremely pleased with the current behavior of the program (:D) and I started feeling sort of irrationally worried like "what if the apartment building caught fire suddenly and all my hardware melted and I lost my work?" so I decided to put it up here and on my web server to give myself peace of mind. ;^^
If you have curses and SDL2 installed, I think it should be as
simple as cding into the checked-out repo and doing:
mkdir build && cd build
autoreconf -i
../configure --srcdir=..
makeThen you can run it from the build directory with
./curses_tracker. That's all I've been doing so far.
If you're on Windows, you should be able to build and run this in
Cygwin. When you're installing Cygwin,
make sure the packages for Git, SDL, curses, GCC, Autoconf, and
Automake are selected. Once you get it running and you're at the
command line, you can run git clone https://github.com/spinnylights/curses_tracker and then cd curses_tracker and then you can use the instructions above.
I can't make any promises this will actually run on anyone else's computer at this point, though. It's still in a very early phase of development and I haven't tested it on anything else but my local workstation yet. Now that it's online I'll probably end up trying it out in some *nix VMs and on Lily's Windows machine.
Copyright 2023 Zoë Sparks (spinnylights)
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License (LICENSE.md) for more details.