7 ms·

Tek – A music making program for 24-bit Unicode terminals

173 points by smartmic 1y ago

neilv 1y ago
In case anyone else wondered, it doesn't seem to involve Tek (Tektronix) terminal graphics. Maybe the name was an homage?
montag 1y ago
Really awesome UI. Is there a quick YouTube demo?
Sharlin 1y ago
Oh no, you're supposed to have the channels on the x-axis and time on the y-axis ;) mutters about good old days
MarcelOlsz 1y ago
I love the top down tracker UI. For some more you can look at Aphex Twin using PlayerPRO [0] and Hitori Tori using Renoise [1] [0] https://vimeo.com/223378825 https://vimeo.com/223378825 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnJY5u6cC7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnJY5u6cC7A Both are mindblowing.
- genewitch 1y ago
  I bought playerpro and we used it for a while, been a long time since I thought of it. I just checked my old Mac CD case and it's not in there, oh well. We also switched to reason around version 3-5.
  - MarcelOlsz 1y ago
    If you ever do find that disc I'd love to buy it from you lol.
    - genewitch 1y ago
      at the very least, you've made up my mind that i need to photograph every 4 disc page in all of my cases, and label the cases. Right now it's like "MissingHandleCase" and "RightLockBrokenCase" and "LocksIntactWithStrapCase" and "LargestUnderBedCase"! I do have discs from that era, as i have 680x0 Mac Performa OS discs - the ones that are silver and black with pixel / icon art of the mac smiley face on them. When i still had an actual SATA optical drive on a machine i was contemplating indexing all of my optical media. I started with some software on windows and it wasn't very good, i looked around for other options and came up with nothing. So i rely on my (admittedly non-perfect) memory of what i had on disc, up to ~30 years ago. I may as well admit: I tried to "patent" an optical media "case" that mechanically held the middle of the disc, like a laptop cdrom spindle does, but with a button to release them so you didn't need to "bend" the disc to remove it. I had cad drawings and everything. But the vaultz cases are "good enough" for my usage - where i rarely, if ever, remove discs from their sleeves. As long as the cases aren't jostled regularly, and never left open and exposed to dust, and kept in a controlled environment (not too hot, not too cold, not too wet, not too dry), i don't forsee any issues from the storage of the discs. Whether or not the foil layer or glue or any of that holds up - well, my optical disc case design was actually gasket sealed, and had something like a Schraeder valve to pump air out, or nitrogen in; this probably would have made the foil and glue last longer. I had completely forgotten i had invented that until i started commenting on the longevity of my optical media. Sorry. Amateur archivist, here. Nice to meet you.
    - dumpsterdiver 1y ago
      Well now I need one. I used PlayerPro even before I started experimenting with the terminal based trackers (FastTracker, etc). It’s so weird, but I can still see an image of the tracker screen from a specific time in my life, and feel echoes of the way it made me feel.
      - genewitch 1y ago
        have you ever seen/used paragon 5 gameboy tracker? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiy5dEgV9-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiy5dEgV9-s obviously i've seen it, but i never wrote anything in it, it makes my eyes hurt. I still use modplug tracker / openMPT (openmpt.org, funded until 2032!), and taught my youngest how to open and play songs with it, and i have a lot of files it can open. thousands.
  - duskwuff 1y ago
    It's open-source now, but never made the transition to 64-bit APIs. https://sourceforge.net/projects/playerpro/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/playerpro/
- montag 1y ago
  nit: Renoise; good stuff, thanks for sharing.
- alisonatwork 1y ago
  This program doesn't look top down to me, it seems like the main sequencing interface is piano roll, although the sample editing looks tracker-inspired. It'll be interesting to see what people do with it. Maybe fans of piano roll will find a lightweight way to get their ideas down that feels simpler than a full Ableton setup? For me I still find piano roll awkward to read. I can't visualize what the music is going to sound like the way I can with a tracker pattern. Perhaps it's because my eyes need to scan left and right and up and down too much to see what each note is? Let's not even get into the problem of having effects configured on a totally different screen. When I transitioned from tracker to hardware and later to Ableton I felt like I wasn't really writing music any more, I was just rearranging sounds till they eventually turned into music. It made for perhaps more surprising and interesting results, but I never really got back the feeling of control and finesse that I had with trackers.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
tzmlab 1y ago
There's demo video at https://v.basspistol.org/w/eUCnnNJugRZ5haqyuYQ2CK https://v.basspistol.org/w/eUCnnNJugRZ5haqyuYQ2CK
yahoozoo 1y ago
Are there any DAWs that support VIM keybinds?
- alisonatwork 1y ago
  I remember seeing one a while ago, and a quick websearch leads me to this Reaper plugin: https://github.com/gwatcha/reaper-keys https://github.com/gwatcha/reaper-keys I think I wouldn't hate a modal tracker nowadays. In the old days when everyone had gigantic keyboards it didn't seem so bad to depend on numpad and F keys and so on, but nowadays it might be cleaner to be more vim-like.
tempaccountabcd 1y ago
[dead]
RIMR 1y ago
For the non-arch users, the build script has a typo: Don't use bin/, use build/
- woolion 1y ago
  The AUR package is also broken, it doesn't fetch the submodule before trying to build. It would be better to just suggest using the static build, as it works OotB.
chaosprint 1y ago
Neat! For those who prefer a more direct, terminal-based approach to making music with code, check out also Glicol-CLI: https://github.com/glicol/glicol-cli https://github.com/glicol/glicol-cli
stuaxo 1y ago
This title makes me desire a hardware 24 bit unicode terminal.
cocodill 1y ago
the binary is kind of broken, output is quite cryptic: Error: ClientError(ClientStatus(FAILURE | SERVER_FAILED))
__m 1y ago
Was hoping to see a tracker, I think that would be a better fit for the terminal
- wormius 1y ago
  It's interesting a lot of us saw this and thought "Tracker" and I googled to see if there was a TUI tracker, and on simple search I don't see one. It seems like that's an interesting idea waiting to be made...

173 points by smartmic 1y ago

In case anyone else wondered, it doesn't seem to involve Tek (Tektronix) terminal graphics. Maybe the name was an homage?

montag 1y ago

Really awesome UI. Is there a quick YouTube demo?

Sharlin 1y ago

Oh no, you're supposed to have the channels on the x-axis and time on the y-axis ;) mutters about good old days

MarcelOlsz 1y ago

I love the top down tracker UI. For some more you can look at Aphex Twin using PlayerPRO [0] and Hitori Tori using Renoise [1] [0] https://vimeo.com/223378825 https://vimeo.com/223378825 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnJY5u6cC7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnJY5u6cC7A Both are mindblowing.

genewitch 1y ago
I bought playerpro and we used it for a while, been a long time since I thought of it. I just checked my old Mac CD case and it's not in there, oh well. We also switched to reason around version 3-5.
- MarcelOlsz 1y ago
  If you ever do find that disc I'd love to buy it from you lol.
  - genewitch 1y ago
    at the very least, you've made up my mind that i need to photograph every 4 disc page in all of my cases, and label the cases. Right now it's like "MissingHandleCase" and "RightLockBrokenCase" and "LocksIntactWithStrapCase" and "LargestUnderBedCase"! I do have discs from that era, as i have 680x0 Mac Performa OS discs - the ones that are silver and black with pixel / icon art of the mac smiley face on them. When i still had an actual SATA optical drive on a machine i was contemplating indexing all of my optical media. I started with some software on windows and it wasn't very good, i looked around for other options and came up with nothing. So i rely on my (admittedly non-perfect) memory of what i had on disc, up to ~30 years ago. I may as well admit: I tried to "patent" an optical media "case" that mechanically held the middle of the disc, like a laptop cdrom spindle does, but with a button to release them so you didn't need to "bend" the disc to remove it. I had cad drawings and everything. But the vaultz cases are "good enough" for my usage - where i rarely, if ever, remove discs from their sleeves. As long as the cases aren't jostled regularly, and never left open and exposed to dust, and kept in a controlled environment (not too hot, not too cold, not too wet, not too dry), i don't forsee any issues from the storage of the discs. Whether or not the foil layer or glue or any of that holds up - well, my optical disc case design was actually gasket sealed, and had something like a Schraeder valve to pump air out, or nitrogen in; this probably would have made the foil and glue last longer. I had completely forgotten i had invented that until i started commenting on the longevity of my optical media. Sorry. Amateur archivist, here. Nice to meet you.
  - dumpsterdiver 1y ago
    Well now I need one. I used PlayerPro even before I started experimenting with the terminal based trackers (FastTracker, etc). It’s so weird, but I can still see an image of the tracker screen from a specific time in my life, and feel echoes of the way it made me feel.
    - genewitch 1y ago
      have you ever seen/used paragon 5 gameboy tracker? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiy5dEgV9-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiy5dEgV9-s obviously i've seen it, but i never wrote anything in it, it makes my eyes hurt. I still use modplug tracker / openMPT (openmpt.org, funded until 2032!), and taught my youngest how to open and play songs with it, and i have a lot of files it can open. thousands.
- duskwuff 1y ago
  It's open-source now, but never made the transition to 64-bit APIs. https://sourceforge.net/projects/playerpro/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/playerpro/
montag 1y ago
nit: Renoise; good stuff, thanks for sharing.
alisonatwork 1y ago
This program doesn't look top down to me, it seems like the main sequencing interface is piano roll, although the sample editing looks tracker-inspired. It'll be interesting to see what people do with it. Maybe fans of piano roll will find a lightweight way to get their ideas down that feels simpler than a full Ableton setup? For me I still find piano roll awkward to read. I can't visualize what the music is going to sound like the way I can with a tracker pattern. Perhaps it's because my eyes need to scan left and right and up and down too much to see what each note is? Let's not even get into the problem of having effects configured on a totally different screen. When I transitioned from tracker to hardware and later to Ableton I felt like I wasn't really writing music any more, I was just rearranging sounds till they eventually turned into music. It made for perhaps more surprising and interesting results, but I never really got back the feeling of control and finesse that I had with trackers.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

tzmlab 1y ago

There's demo video at https://v.basspistol.org/w/eUCnnNJugRZ5haqyuYQ2CK https://v.basspistol.org/w/eUCnnNJugRZ5haqyuYQ2CK

yahoozoo 1y ago

Are there any DAWs that support VIM keybinds?

alisonatwork 1y ago
I remember seeing one a while ago, and a quick websearch leads me to this Reaper plugin: https://github.com/gwatcha/reaper-keys https://github.com/gwatcha/reaper-keys I think I wouldn't hate a modal tracker nowadays. In the old days when everyone had gigantic keyboards it didn't seem so bad to depend on numpad and F keys and so on, but nowadays it might be cleaner to be more vim-like.

tempaccountabcd 1y ago

[dead]

RIMR 1y ago

For the non-arch users, the build script has a typo: Don't use bin/, use build/

woolion 1y ago
The AUR package is also broken, it doesn't fetch the submodule before trying to build. It would be better to just suggest using the static build, as it works OotB.

chaosprint 1y ago

Neat! For those who prefer a more direct, terminal-based approach to making music with code, check out also Glicol-CLI: https://github.com/glicol/glicol-cli https://github.com/glicol/glicol-cli

stuaxo 1y ago

This title makes me desire a hardware 24 bit unicode terminal.

cocodill 1y ago

the binary is kind of broken, output is quite cryptic: Error: ClientError(ClientStatus(FAILURE | SERVER_FAILED))

__m 1y ago

Was hoping to see a tracker, I think that would be a better fit for the terminal

wormius 1y ago
It's interesting a lot of us saw this and thought "Tracker" and I googled to see if there was a TUI tracker, and on simple search I don't see one. It seems like that's an interesting idea waiting to be made...