Gamebuino Music Tracker

[Myndale]

Hi everyone,

I've started work on a music tracker for Gamebuino, now that the the holiday break is over I'll be resuming that development in earnest. While I have the technical ability to develop the software itself I have no experience and/or talent with actual chip tunes composition whatsoever. Cyberic and "The Other Days" have kindly offered to help with the design side but I'll be posting updates here as I progress and as always would appreciate any feedback and suggestions.

The GitHub repository for this project is here: https://github.com/Myndale/GBT

The project is being developed in WPF/MVVM (.NET 4.5), the basic architecture is in place and I've just started doing some tests with the pattern editor. Conceptually I was thinking of doing something like this:



The idea is that you can drag instruments and patterns from the tree control on the left into the panels in the main editor pane, but I'm not 100% dead-set on doing it like this if anyone thinks there's a better way. The big question mark in my mind is the effects pane on the far right....my memory of trackers dates back to the 90s and I seem to recall them having one effect per channel per row, whereas the Gamebuino music playback code allows for an arbitrary number of effects.

With respect to scheduling my aim is to get a very basic editor up and running as quickly as possible and then start building upon that. First pass will probably therefore be a single pattern editor with in-tracker playback and C code export.

[Drakker]

I don't want to be that guy complaining all the time, but well, I'll do it one more time. ;) Is there any reason why you use WPF in .NET 4.5 rather than a more portable solution that would allow your tools to work natively on Linux / OSX / etc.? There's no plan to include WPF support in mono in the future...

[Myndale]

Perfectly valid question, the short answer is "Because it'll be faster for me to develop". Like you, I don't have as much time to devote to Gamebuino as I'd like, and .NET is a technology that that I'm very familiar with and allows for high productivity with minimal effort. If someone else would like to have a go at writing a cross-platform tracker then that'd be great and I'd be happy to help out in any way I can. For this one though I'll be sticking to what I know best in order to get a working product up and running as quickly as possible.

[Jamish]

I worked with WPF at my last job, so I might be of some use to you. Anything specific that I could help out with? If I have time, that is...

[Drakker]

It is unfortunately the answer I feared because it removes all hopes for a portable version. ;)

[Skyrunner65]

I just hope that it is portable, as I still have to get Windows 7 for my PC, so I can use it on my school laptop(Administrator stuff).

[DFX2KX]

I just hope that it is portable, as I still have to get Windows 7 for my PC, so I can use it on my school laptop(Administrator stuff).

It'll be .net, so it won't be, unfortunately.

[Skyrunner65]

Curses.
Well, I hoped I could put it on my flash drive.
Still, cool project, I'll get it when I can support 4.5.

EDIT: How about a name?
Couple of ideas are below.
SynthBuino?
GBTracker?