Microtone — a tracker workstation for any tuning
Microtone is a free music tracker that runs in your web browser. It looks new-school, but underneath it carries on the ScreamTracker and Impulse Tracker lineage: the same effect letters, instruments with envelopes and NNAs, and the same rows of hex numbers. Then I widened it:
- 16-bit effect arguments: F $xxxx where you are used to F $xx.
- Any tuning. Pitch sits on a grid of 4096 steps per octave, so a song can be in 12-TET, 19-, 31- or 53-TET, Bohlen-Pierce, ProTracker's own period tuning, or a notation you design yourself. The pattern editor names and steps through the notes of whichever one you pick.
- 3D audio. Pan sounds all the way round you, or above and below, then export stereo, binaural, 5.1/7.1 or ambisonics up to 3rd order.
- FM synthesis from any waveform: put instruments in an FM rack and they modulate each other.
Some limits stay where they were, on purpose. Samples are 8-bit and at most 64 KB each, in an 8 MB pool, and the mix keeps its dithered 8-bit grit.
It opens MOD, S3M, XM and IT files directly. It imports MIDI through a SoundFont and takes instruments from any .sf2 file. It also has a sample lab for recording, chopping and building chords, a mastering chain that is saved with the song, and stem export. The bundled demo songs are there to be opened and taken apart.
For sceners:
- Sign in with your SceneID to keep up to 8 projects online and open them in any browser.
- taudplay, the player library, plays .taud files exactly as the tracker does, down to the sample. It comes in two flavours, both LGPL: JavaScript (npm install taudplay) and portable C99 that needs nothing but libm. Both give you a fader per lane and 16 interrupts that the song itself fires, for syncing your visuals to the music.
There's nothing to install and no account needed. Your files stay on your machine unless you put them online. Microtone is free software under GPLv3.
https://microtone.cc
https://github.com/Microtone-Project/Microtone.js
https://github.com/Microtone-Project/taudplay-c
- 16-bit effect arguments: F $xxxx where you are used to F $xx.
- Any tuning. Pitch sits on a grid of 4096 steps per octave, so a song can be in 12-TET, 19-, 31- or 53-TET, Bohlen-Pierce, ProTracker's own period tuning, or a notation you design yourself. The pattern editor names and steps through the notes of whichever one you pick.
- 3D audio. Pan sounds all the way round you, or above and below, then export stereo, binaural, 5.1/7.1 or ambisonics up to 3rd order.
- FM synthesis from any waveform: put instruments in an FM rack and they modulate each other.
Some limits stay where they were, on purpose. Samples are 8-bit and at most 64 KB each, in an 8 MB pool, and the mix keeps its dithered 8-bit grit.
It opens MOD, S3M, XM and IT files directly. It imports MIDI through a SoundFont and takes instruments from any .sf2 file. It also has a sample lab for recording, chopping and building chords, a mastering chain that is saved with the song, and stem export. The bundled demo songs are there to be opened and taken apart.
For sceners:
- Sign in with your SceneID to keep up to 8 projects online and open them in any browser.
- taudplay, the player library, plays .taud files exactly as the tracker does, down to the sample. It comes in two flavours, both LGPL: JavaScript (npm install taudplay) and portable C99 that needs nothing but libm. Both give you a fader per lane and 16 interrupts that the song itself fires, for syncing your visuals to the music.
There's nothing to install and no account needed. Your files stay on your machine unless you put them online. Microtone is free software under GPLv3.
https://microtone.cc
https://github.com/Microtone-Project/Microtone.js
https://github.com/Microtone-Project/taudplay-c
[Submitted by CuriousTorvald]