itch.io

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.

<3

<3

Thanks for sharing these! I just went through all of them and they’re all so nice!

Glad you’re having so much fun with it :)

Oh, and I forgot to mention: the setting can be different for all tunes and is saved separately.

I’ve uploaded version 1.1.4 with the new feature.

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 exactly. In principle the correct tempo names would be cool, but I think it adds more confusion than it solves.

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.

That’s a good idea. What would be a good unit / way to specify the tempo?

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.

I pushed out an update (1.1.2) that should address the problem: https://tizian.itch.io/playdate-music-box/devlog/647665/bugfix-release-112

(In case you’re curious, the reason behind it was related to the Playdate’s internal file system: https://devforum.play.date/t/asset-filenames-ending-in-non-alpha-char-before-extension-work-in-simulator-but-fail-on-device/11777/10)

Thanks again for reporting!

Thank you! Kind messages like this are the best thing about making something for the playdate community. <3

I’m able to reproduce the “.” bug on my device and I’ll look into it when I find some time. Thanks for reporting that.

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/

Unfortunately no.

Thank you! I don’t have any plans on making it open source at this point, though I might revisit that in the future.

Thanks for the nice words!

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.

<3

I just re-uploaded the file. Could you please try downloading it again? Sorry for the inconvenience!

I’ve re-uploaded once more. This time explicitly as a .pdx.zip, and this seems to download the right thing now at least for me.

Interesting, thanks for letting me know. I’ll look into this right now but I find it super weird. What I upload to itch.io is definitely a .pdx file…

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?

FYI: I released an update today with adjustable lengths.

FYI: I released an update today with tuneable notes, including sharps.

FYI: I released an update today with adjustable lengths and tuneable notes.

Thanks! Different sounds is not really something that is on my radar at the moment but let me think about it.

I’m currently working on an update with few more features including:

• the option to “tune” each individual note to an arbitrary pitch
• variable length songs (that are still within some limit)

So hopefully I can release that soon.

Not yet. But it’s on my TODO list to allow tuning each individual note. I hope to find time to work on an update with a few more features in February.

Yes I’m aware of these.

Thanks!

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.

Thanks for the feedback, and the kind words.

The crank direction is fixed in version 1.0.3.

Oh good to know, thanks! I’ve replaced the current 1.0.2 file. I hope it’s working correctly now.

Thanks for letting me know! That was a silly little oversight.

It is now fixed in version 1.0.2.

Got it.

The functionality itself is easily added. But it will require some thought about a reasonable GUI etc.

I pushed out a bugfix release (1.0.1) that should fix it.

Thanks for reporting this!

Fair point :)

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.

The video is private, you might need to make it public or “unlisted”.

I just tried sideloading it via the website as well (previously I installed it directly via the SDK). But that doesn’t make a difference.

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.

Hmm. Still nothing for me, even when the crank is out :( Is this maybe a Playdate system thing? I’m on version 1.12.3.

Oh I didn’t even know about that system button shortcut! Unfortunately I can’t reproduce this on my device. Just to be sure, is this the sequence of events that triggers it for you?

• Start the game from the main menu
• Press “A” on a song
• Select “Play”
• Press “Menu” + “Left” or “Right” a few times
• Press “B”