• Registered: 2015-07-07
  • Posts: 13

Topic: Best beeper music: top100 rating.

Hello fellows!
Thanks to all helping people and music authors, ZX-Art became a one of the biggest online ZX Spectrum beeper collections. At the moment we have 826 beeper tunes, starting from classic games (thanks to WoS, Ay-Project, AYGOR) and ending with modern music competitions.
Since we have achieved this, I have organized a top 100 of beeper melodies according to ZX-Art listeners.
http://zxart.ee/eng/music/top-100/beeper/ - here it is, please take a look.

Problems:
1. Many, many of the major beeper works are still missing. I would be really grateful if you could help collecting as many as possible in one place.
2. Ratings are not pretending to be ideal. In fact, they are far from ideal at the moment, many beepers still have 1-2 votes, which can hardly be called objective at all. This is where I need your help as well - please register, listen to beeper (you can use beeper radio as well!) and leave your votes!

My ultimate goal is making a one big archive of all beeper tunes, so nothing could be lost, and any beeper tune could be played online in browser by anyone in any time. I can clearly see, that nowadays beeper makes a large competition to AY on ZX Spectrum, let's promote it even more than that smile
I hope that one day ZX-Art will become an everyday tool for beeper musicians. Please leave any suggestions here or to my email moroz1999@gmail.com

  • utz
  • utz
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  • Registered: 2015-06-28
  • Posts: 1,022

Re: Best beeper music: top100 rating.

Neat! But yeah, definately needs more votes. Also yes, I think e.g. a lot of stuff from BotB is still missing. Unfortunately I don't have enough time to sift through and convert those entries atm. I think it would be really helpful if there was a conversion tool which would make the process a bit less time-consuming. Perhaps you could get in touch with puke7 from BotB to see if it's possible to utilize meta-data from BotB somehow?

In any case, I've added a link in the forum header, hope that'll help to generate a few clicks wink

website | bintracker | github | bandcamp | soundcloud

utz's Website

  • Registered: 2015-06-29
  • Posts: 365

Re: Best beeper music: top100 rating.

A comprehensive archive of beeper music will be great smile

I agree with utz, there are lots of zx beeper tunes from botb that need including, many really great ones. I've been collecting them for a while now.

What format do you need them submitted in? .ay ?

I think Abrimaal has done work converting beeper tracks to .ay for his own archive so could maybe provide some of the missing tunes ?

ZX Beeper Album: 1-bit Mechanistic
  • utz
  • utz
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Re: Best beeper music: top100 rating.

Abrimaal's collection (= AYGOR) has already been added, I think. And yes, moroz needs .ay. I have some cruddy (Linux) toolchain which helps with the conversion, but it's still a lot of manual work.

website | bintracker | github | bandcamp | soundcloud

utz's Website

  • Registered: 2015-06-29
  • Posts: 368

Re: Best beeper music: top100 rating.

moroz1999 wrote:

I hope that one day ZX-Art will become an everyday tool for beeper musicians.

hello, I consider ZX-Art as a very valuable place for everyone enjoying pictures and music. It's easy to upload tunes (and pictures), browse and play them, the interface is great and clean. I don't have idea to improve ZX-Art, I think it's already perfect.

One question, I don't really under the rating, why this work http://zxart.ee/eng/authors/t/tim-follin/agentx/  which as only 5, has a rating of 4,14? Is it because there is a starting value before the first vote?

I'm in the process to submit my beeper and ay tunes on it!

Maybe one day "Vapeurs d'alcool" will enter the TOP100, who knows? wink

my 1-bit music - my soundcloud
  • Registered: 2015-06-29
  • Posts: 365

Re: Best beeper music: top100 rating.

Vapeurs is currently sitting at number 52 wink

ZX Beeper Album: 1-bit Mechanistic

7 Reply by garvalf (edited by garvalf 2016-02-19 21:11:41)

  • Registered: 2015-06-29
  • Posts: 368

Re: Best beeper music: top100 rating.

wow, thank you guys!
I don't know how the algorithm  because some other songs have the same note as my tune (5, 5, 4) and they are at a lower rank. Maybe it's random at the moment because there aren't enough notations.

btw do you know how to submit music to http://zxtunes.com/ ?

my 1-bit music - my soundcloud
  • Registered: 2015-07-07
  • Posts: 13

Re: Best beeper music: top100 rating.

Thanks a lot for a feedback!
1. AYGOR is not imported yet, since it's really hard to understand, what needs to be imported and what is already done, it requires a lot of manual search. Also, we are trying to keeping all meta-info as well - party places, release notes and so on. AYGOR may be a good source of .ay files, but we should somehow review the BOTB parties separately.
2. At the moment .ay format is the only one which is both easily automatically converted to mp3/ogg and can be potentially started up on real machine. If there is tracker file (bbsong?) as well, then it can be included in same tune for archivation.
3. Rating is calculated according to IMDB formula, so the less votes there are, the closer rating is to overall average vote, and vice versa.
I haven't seen any work with rating 5.0, dunno if it's possible using provided maths. Anyway, it seems like it's perfect for taking amount of votes into account, not only the average vote.

  • Registered: 2015-07-07
  • Posts: 13

Re: Best beeper music: top100 rating.

I'm also planning to make a beeper radio available on other websites. For example, for including it here as an easy to install Javascript widget.

  • Registered: 2015-08-05
  • Posts: 32

Re: Best beeper music: top100 rating.

I've just converted a few tracks to .ay and uploaded them.

I spent some time getting the length correct, using AY-Emul to test.  However, after uploading, all the tracks play for a couple of seconds longer.

11 Reply by introspec (edited by introspec 2016-05-05 18:36:40)

  • From: London
  • Registered: 2015-06-29
  • Posts: 66

Re: Best beeper music: top100 rating.

FrankT, .AY players do not get store the configuration information in .AY headers. Hence, the players are allowed to play as if they were uncontended 48K models, or contended models, or models with various numbers of t-states per frame. You just get no guarantees whatsoever. Frankly, .AY needs to be re-designed to take configurations into account, otherwise timings will never be spot on. Abarimal proposed a way to smuggle configuration information via some non-standard interpretation of less useful standard fields, but I always felt that this is not the proper way to do it.

introspec's Website

12 Reply by Shiru (edited by Shiru 2016-05-06 15:29:35)

  • Shiru
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  • From: Russia, Moscow
  • Registered: 2015-07-01
  • Posts: 513

Re: Best beeper music: top100 rating.

I highly agree with that point. AY file format is really old and imprecise way to store ripped music, it seriously needs to be obsoleted and replaced with a new properly designed format.

website - 1bit music - other music - youtube - bandcamp - patreon - twitter (latest news there)

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13 Reply by FrankT (edited by FrankT 2016-05-06 18:32:43)

  • Registered: 2015-08-05
  • Posts: 32

Re: Best beeper music: top100 rating.

If CPU and AY speed was read, there wouldn't be a need to provide a time/length for the tune.  It could be calculated how long the tune plays for.

The only thing I need to know is what speed CPU/AY is used on the website.  So I can put the correct time in the AY header.  So the tunes play for the correct length on the website.

I did a google search for Pentagon timings, but only found different AY timings for Timex.  I have the different timings for 48k/128k models, but not uncontended.  If I knew the magic numbers, I could just calculate the length myself for the AY header.

Edit:  Or, allow looping of songs with a fade timeout.  AY players do loop correctly, regardless of the time entered in the AY header.

  • From: London
  • Registered: 2015-06-29
  • Posts: 66

Re: Best beeper music: top100 rating.

FrankT, the website is using ZXTune to render .AY into web-friendly formats.
Hence, you can just read documentation for ZXTune or simply use it directly to establish accurate timings.
The problem of course is that if ZXTune will be replaced by another renderer in the future, all your hard work will be in vein.

introspec's Website

15 Reply by FrankT (edited by FrankT 2016-05-06 20:41:45)

  • Registered: 2015-08-05
  • Posts: 32

Re: Best beeper music: top100 rating.

Using ZXTune now, why are the timings so different to AY_Emul?  When using the same timings in both programs, ZXTune and AY_Emul, they have 4 seconds difference on a 3 minute tune.

  • From: London
  • Registered: 2015-06-29
  • Posts: 66

Re: Best beeper music: top100 rating.

4/180 ~ 1/45, i.e. about 2.2%. My guess is that one of them emulates contention, whereas the other does not.
This is why we need headers actually saying what configuration your measured time corresponds to.

introspec's Website