Jsfxr: 8-Bit sound maker and sfx generator | Hacker News Reader

Jsfxr: 8-Bit sound maker and sfx generator

sfxr.me

116 pointsmemalign25 comments

Jsfxr was originally developed by Eric Fredricksen:

I maintain the sfxr.me fork which adds some quality of life improvements, and pro.sfxr.me which brings cloud saving, sound packs, and other features.

Eric is also the creator of Progress Quest, the original idle game!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Quest

It's not very 2024, but here's the original binary you can run on your own computer, with no js or pro subscription:

https://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html

Sfxr was my go-to in highschool for XNA 3.1 games. It's a very useful, tiny tool.

Microsoft made a big mistake killing XNA. The Xbox 360 had a great community of indie developers.

Yeah, I loved it personally. XNA lives on as MonoGame, but it never felt quite the same to me.

I think that tool lineage is one of the canonical example of software history.

First a great tool. Then incompatible copycats that add some incompatible enhancements. Then some JS rewrites. Then some SaaS freemium offering...

A friend of mine made one of these years ago, simply because he needed one for his own Ludum Dare game jams. I'm obviously biased but I like the interface a little bit more:

https://frozenfractal.com/projects/jfxr/

https://jfxr.frozenfractal.com/

Very thankful for jfxr, I'm using it to create all the sound effects for my game.

I re-implemented his synthesizer in C++ so that the sound effects can be generated at runtime: https://github.com/pewpewlive/ppl-synth The sound files are just Lua tables that specify the characteristics of the sound effects, like so:

sounds = { { frequency = 500, waveform = "triangle", } }

That's pretty neat! Probably has good compression possibilities too if you come up with a compact serialization scheme.

This looks very similar to https://killedbyapixel.github.io/ZzFX/ whose author does lots of tiny Javascript code things (dweets, demos, a tiny game engine recently)

They have the same heritage.

https://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html

https://www.bfxr.net/

Ah yeah, nice! I used DrPetter's sfxr (and cfxr) for a couple game jams. Very useful for quick sound synthesis, great starting point even to use as extra awesomeness to layer on top of other sounds (like hastily-recorded foley audio) :)

this is something similar that i recently used, its the nicest one out of all the ones i tried imo https://sfbgames.itch.io/chiptone

I like how it manages to be a hybrid of a skeuomorphic and flat interface, which are supposed to be polar opposites on the design spectrum. Very beautiful

For a brief moment I read JSFxr, as Java Server Faces xr and had terrible nightmares from the past

I've always used Famitracker to make 8-bit sound effects.

I use sounds generated by it for the notification sound and the ringing tone (though I edited it out to include a 5 second silence at the end). I thought about creating an app for that to make it easy for everyone to have simple and completely custom sounds good their phone.

My favorite SFXR alternative is this one which has a very nice UI: https://sfbgames.itch.io/chiptone

I want this as a VST plugin. I look at the pro model and it's a subscription!

Why, sounds aren't constantly changing.

Edit : Looks like people are commenting free alternatives, thank you

Not really 8-Bit, but for the same purpose - to provide a simple means of getting sound effects into a game: https://tabletopy.com

nice! I like the hidden gem that you click on the generator to get new random parameters.

this is a great application for ML!

What is ML, Sir?

music lovers!

merci infiniment

https://erl-j.github.io/textsynth/

Sortof ML, Evolutionary algorithm w/ fitness determined by a ML model.

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