8bit.js: Write music using 8bit oscillation sounds

https://github.com/meenie/8bit.js

by bulkan • 13 years ago

64 19 13 years ago

github.com

tomek2k1• 13 years ago

Does not work in any browser except Safari and Chrome

harrytuttle• 13 years ago

I think that should be labelled "does not work full stop".

I've had this rant before but WebKit is becoming the new IE6 and it's pissing me off as a Firefox and IE user.

przemoc4• 13 years ago

I don't like the comparison, because IE6 wasn't really ahead of its competition, yet WebKit simply gives you possibility to play with new APIs and not-yet-finished "standards", without waiting for them to become official standards (and already existing implementation helps to improve/fix them before getting final version).

I haven't checked that this is the case (i.e. whether making it work in Fx would be huge burden or even impossible), possibly not. Anyway, just saying.

sjtgraham• 13 years ago

It's a technical demonstration of the W3C WebAudio API. By your logic we shouldn't have great demos such as these because a subset of vendors haven't pulled their finger's out of their collective arses to implement a spec that's been around for a couple years.

Sorry you're pissed off, but your rant is directed at the wrong people. Go file bug reports with Mozilla and Microsoft instead of chastising someone for making something cool.

chrislo• 13 years ago

But it is written using the Web Audio API, support for which is now available in Firefox nightly builds, for example. At the moment the FF builds do not support the OscillatorNode used by this library, but when they do this should work fine.

We're working hard on the spec and its test suite to make it easy for other browser vendors to support the API, so hopefully we'll see support for it in more browsers soon.

Disclaimer: I co-chair the W3C Web Audio WG.

padenot• 13 years ago

We landed OscillatorNode support yesterday or something, and it kind of works just fine in Firefox. Kind of, because there is a _horrible_ noise before you press play and after the track finishes. I'm looking into it at the moment.

victoriap• 13 years ago

Seems cool. HTML5 games can now have their Atari/Nintendo tracks.

logn• 13 years ago

Keep in mind, the browser can do more than 8bit sounds.

sdfjkl• 13 years ago

8bit sounds are nonetheless still very popular for a certain genre of games.

przemoc4• 13 years ago

I like the idea, but providing the notes is extremely tedious here. In my old PCSpk (PC-Speaker Server & Client) I made up following notation (excerpt from README):

  first 3-digit number is integer - tempo (bpm)
  next are space seperated values TOL, where:
  T is letter - tone: C,d(des),D,e(es),E,F,g(ges),G,a(as),A,B,H,P(pause)
  O is digit - octave: 0-9
  L is digit/letter - length: L=0-9,A-Z <=> 1/(L+1)

J.S.Bach - Fugue in D minor (fragment):

  240 A47 G47 A47 F47 A47 E47 A47 D47 A47 d47 A47 D47 A47 E47 A47 F47 A47 A37 A47 H37 A47 d47 A47 D47 A47 d47 A47 D47 A47 E47 A47 D43

I've written also Siemens ringtone converter to above format in gawk (GNU awk).

http://git.io/siemens.gawk

EDIT: I just realized that you may wonder what is H there. For conciseness I'll quote Wikipedia on that matter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(musical_note)

However, in Germany, Central and Eastern Europe, and Scandinavia, the label B is used for what, above, is called B-flat, and the note a semitone below C is called H.

kamkha• 13 years ago

There's a fairly well-established notation similar to what you made up: ABC notation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_notation).

przemoc4• 13 years ago

Yes, back then (2005) I didn't know about ABC nor Lilypond (which I've started using since end of 2011, month after end of my music prototyping Ask HN thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3089259, which will hopefully get some follow-up in the future).

To be honest, today I would slightly change my notation, to make it more readable, consistent and friendlier for English-speaking people:

  OTD[.]
  O - octave: [0-9]
  T - tone: C,d(es),D,e(s),E,F,g(es),G,a(s),A,b(es),B,P(ause)
  D - duration: [0-9A-Z] meaning:
                breve (double whole note) // for D==0
                1/D note                  // for D!=0
  . - dotted note, changes duration to:   // d - duration
                d(2 - 1/2^n)              // n - number of dots

Same fugue would start like:

  4A8 4G8 4A8 4F8 4A8 4E8 4A8 4D8 4A8 4d8 4A8 4D8 4A8

which is so much more better...

Why I didn't do it like that from the beginning? No idea...

Kiro• 13 years ago

How does it generate the sound?

meenie2• 13 years ago

It uses the new HTML5 AudioContext() functionality. - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/AudioContex...

meenie2• 13 years ago

Hey guys, thanks for posting my library. I put it up yesterday and it just exploded all over the net haha. I plan on making it easier to input notation as well as support the importing of midi files (although I'm not sure how that would be useful since there are already players for those). This library started out as an experiment last weekend, but it seems it could be something that Game Devs want to use in their games :). So I'll be keeping up development and most likely creating a GUI to create songs this weekend.

If anyone has any suggestions or questions, then please raise them here: https://github.com/meenie/8bit.js/issues

8bit.js: Write music using 8bit oscillation sounds

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