Early 8-bit Sounds from _why's Bloopsaphone | Hacker News Reader

Early 8-bit Sounds from _why's Bloopsaphone

urbanhonking.com

14 pointsatduskgreg10 comments

It's missing some chutzpah, but I really like the idea. I have played around with nano loop [ http://www.nanoloop.de/ ] and tweakbench has some awesome freeware vstis [ http://www.tweakbench.com/ ]. Most of these attempts, however, have either a horrid UI or lack a robust feature set. While I have not done too much coding in the vst/signals area (some dsp in MATLAB I suppose) I would totally be down for coding a really solid 8-bit sound emulator. If anyone wants, feel free to ping me and discuss it -- davenport dot mike at gmail

Tried to add my note to the post, but it seems to be moderated. So here's my comment:

Well, here's another - due to lack of time unfinished - Bloopsaphone tune of mine. It's called "warp-o-mat", which grew out of a test of my FX commands implementation:

http://gist.github.com/110939 http://freQvibez.net/music/warp-o-mat.mp3

Oh, and here's a mp3 of Cheeky Drat, without distortion: http://freQvibez.net/music/cheeky_drat.mp3

Hey! Sorry about the delay on moderating your comment. For some reason MT didn't notify me about it being there. I've approved it now so it's up on the actual post. And thanks for the awesome tunes and your work on Bloops!

Oh and freQvibez, it would be totally awesome if you wrote up a post explaining in more detail the options for sound creation and configuration. At this point, I've pretty much been mainly copying existing sounds and tweaking them. As far as I can tell there's no comprehensive spot with all of the options listed out.

Funny, this linked off to "Kind of Bloop", which is a project I'd never heard of...two of the songs the guy putting Kind of Bloop together wants 8 bit covers of, I made covers of when I was maybe 17, or so, on my Amiga using ProTracker. I wonder if I still have those files. These days I've got a C64 for chiptune making at home and a GameBoy for chiptune making on the train.

I am very happy whenever I see hackers taking interest in audio software. There has been some fascinating progress in technology/processing ability in the last 5 years or so, but it's always fun to get back to the basics (as Bloopasphone does).

One sound creation tool that might be of interest to hacker/music types is Reaktor: (http://www.native-instruments.com/index.php?id=reaktor5_us). It's something like a visual programming language with an underlying scripting language, and bundled with a dizzying number of modules and programs.

In Reaktor, casual users get ordinary interfaces to bundled preset virtual instruments but as you might imagine, you can dive very, very far down the rabbit hole.

Reaktor now actually is almost 10 years old; used to be called Generator. (I worked at Native Instruments before founding Directed Edge.)

Similar to Reaktor is also Max/MSP and its uglier, but open source, cousins jMax and Pd.

For things a little closer to code there are CSound and SuperCollider and the less-mature-but-more-elegant ChucK.

What's going on with Hackety Hack anyway? The website still says March 7th, which has, obviously, come and gone.

He's obviously free to release it whenever he feels like it (or never), I'm just curious.

Hackety Hack was demoed at Art and Code as promised. Supposedly, _why's just cleaning up bugs and what not to get it presentable before throwing it out there. I had a friend who helped out with the Art and Code demo and he said it's functionality was really impressive but it was still a bit buggy. I think _why really wants to make a splash with the launch and so is being somewhat conservative with the release.

The 0.7 version isn't too bad. I give it to people who want to learn ruby but don't want to buy a book. There's a simple interactive learning tool that is useful if you've never programmed in your life before.

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