Thanks!
I also don’t have much musical experience, my tips would be to not worry too much and just try simple little melodies that you know well. There’s a few “advanced features” like changing the keys for the individual notes—but these can be safely be ignored at the beginning.
Otherwise, some users are sharing more tunes to download in this folder.
NPMs go from 40 to 680 at the moment, which is hopefully enough range. (40 seems comically slow, and some point after 680 the current game logic isn’t accurate enough anymore to play all notes.)
Yeah notes per minute sounds like the clearest option. (BPM is potentially confusing because it won’t quite be what people usually expect it to be.)
I was looking into the code requirements of this a bit yesterday and it should be totally doable. This also made me realize that the “NPM” are quite high for all three settings currently. And really somewhat arbitrary:
Slow: ~195 NPM
Medium: ~260 NPM
Fast: ~390 NPM
An integer option for this (per tune) would be a nice addition indeed.
Alright! 128 is actually a much nicer number (2^7). That indeed adds a couple of more options for measures as you mention. I uploaded an updated version 1.1.3.
There is a big yellow “Download Now” button on the page. Afterwards, you can follow these instructions to install the downloaded file onto your Playdate: https://help.play.date/games/sideloading/
What song length do you think would be appropriate? My main goal here is to capture the charm of physical music boxes in this style and I feel like the current lenghts (between 20–120 notes) is a fairly good sweet spot. (In the initial release it was fixed to 48 which was arguably a bit too limited I think.)
This already involves significant “cheating” for the rendering of the turning cylinder as there couldn’t be enough physical space for all these notes.
I did silently re-upload the .pdx file yesterday after seeing the comment. I didn’t mention it because I didn’t think it made a difference, but maybe that was it.
Thanks for letting us know!
Huh, I haven’t seen this before. Did you have a previous version installed before or is this a fresh install?
I just double checked and it works for me as expected. Are you sure you’re uploading the .pdx file to the website and not some .zip for instance?
I’m still undecided whether I want to support longer songs. In principle there is nothing wrong with it but I feel it might take away a bit from the concept of a “simple music box” that is at least somewhat realistic.
Some form of auto play is on my TODO list, though I’m extremely busy with other things at the moment. I hope I will find time to work on a few additions in February.
Alternate tunings/keys is something I’m interested in adding. I don’t know much about music theory (and surprisingly little about actual music boxes)—do you think it would be sufficient to add the other major and minor keys? Or should there be more fine grained control over which 18 notes are used for each song?
Thanks!!
Ok I finally managed to trigger the bug as well :)
It also depends on the order in which the two buttons are pressed. I always pressed the menu button first, and then left/right. But I can now reproduce it if I first hold down “left” and then add the menu button. Weird. I’ll have a look.
From a statistical perspective I totally agree with you. Most cases can probably be broken down to something very space efficient. Most songs in this representation are essentially a sparse matrix.
What makes the password approach less appealing to me personally is that you could still build pathological examples where you don’t save much with such a compression scheme. In other words, passwords would have a variable length and, in the worst case, are probably as long as the full tune (modulo some base64 encoding or something).
And it becomes less practical in case I implement the option to compose longer tunes.
