bintracker 0.1.1 (Page 2 of 3)

Ok, that's good to hear. So, seems I just gotta fix one more bug reported by Tufty before the 0.1.1 release.
Would be interesting to know why it fails on your other machine, though. I mean you can enter numbers in the actual pattern data, right? The pattern name editing thingy uses another keyhandler, but based on the same principle, so I'm really puzzled about what's going on here.

If I had to set up a new system, I'd actually be tempted to give one of the *BSDs a try. It's getting increasingly difficult to keep Linux pulseaudio-free, and I don't trust this systemd stuff either...

Btw selecting from dropdown lists is now possible with arrow keys and enter

the arrown dropdown list is a great addition, thanks.

For the makefile, if you change clang++ to g++, there is still an error with LDFLAGS, because we must remove -stdlib=libc++ as well (maybe it has been changed in g++ > 5). I don't know if there is a clean way of switching to clang++ to g++, I've tried something like

ifeq "$(CC)" "clang++"
    LDFLAGS        = -stdlib=libc++ -L/usr/lib -lallegro -lallegro_image -lallegro_font -lallegro_primitives -lallegro_dialog -lallegro_audio
else
   LDFLAGS        = -L/usr/lib -lallegro -lallegro_image -lallegro_font -lallegro_primitives -lallegro_dialog -lallegro_audio
endif

but it doesn't work like that.

I've made a pull request for the audioBuffer thing. What is the difference between the original code and your fix to make it compile on g++ 4.8? If you think it might be a problem, just don't integrate the pull request. https://github.com/utz82/bintracker/pull/4/files

I realize now that this is a much more significant problem than I thought. The problem is this: When you save a song in bintracker, it will iterate over the existing blocks (patterns/tables/etc) and save all of them to the file, whether they are used or not. However, when you load that file back into bintracker, MDAL does the parsing, and MDAL determines the block type from the usage context, which means for blocks that aren't referenced either in the sequence or by a command, the block type cannot be determined. So consequently those non-referenced blocks will be ignored, and will be lost the next time you save your song.

This is something that needs to be addressed in the upcoming new MDAL version 2 standard, but I haven't found a good solution to the problem yet. Actually in MDAL2 things will be worse, since there will be a new abstraction layer between user input and data output. Eg. right now, an input block is directly converted into an output block, but in MDAL2 this will be different. There will be abstract "input blocks" which are then converted into "output blocks" in multiple ways. Take for example PhaseSqueek: Right now, writing FxTables is very inconvenient, because the entire set of commands is affected. With the new abstraction layer, you will be able to write seperate tables for each channel or maybe even each command, and MDAL will take care of merging them into the actual FxTable blocks. tl;dr, we'll see a lot more different blocktypes in MDAL2.

So, as I said, I'm still looking for a solution for this problem, and I'd very much appreciate some input on this issue. Right now I'm leaning towards
requiring MDAL block names to be prefixed with the input blocktype name, eg. instead of ":pattern1", you'd write something like "PATTERNS:pattern1". Probably even go further and ditch pattern names (can you imagine writing a sequence for ZX-16 using pattern names?), so the new syntax would be something like "PATTERNS:01". (Actual pattern names would be implemented as a command, in this case.) However, this could get rather messy and unintuitive for users, considering that there might be a large number of input block types, and implementations will vary quite a bit depending on the engine. Eg. in ZX-16, there should be one single input blocktype (called eg. PATTERNS, containing one NOTE command and one SLIDE command), which can be used for each of the 16 channels. In engines with channels that have different capabilities (think Phaser1 for example), there could be different input blocktypes for each channel. So then we'd have "PATTERNS_CH1:xx", "PATTERNS_CH2:xx", and so forth - not exactly user-friendly imo. On the other hand, it'd be easier to avoid namespace clashes that way, which is actually a thing in MDAL1: It's perfectly legal to give the same name to a pattern and an non-pattern block, and theoretically the parser should magically figure out which is which, which doesn't happen of course.

Another solution would be to generate a list of unused blocks for each blocktype when saving a module. However, as mentioned before, I believe named patterns should probably go, because there are several problems with them.

I think the "don't save" option is pretty bad, so I definately want to solve it for MDAL2 Should be doable considering the whole thing is gonna be rewritten from scratch anyway.

Regarding "labelled" blocks, I have to see about it. I like your idea, but on the other hand I want to avoid "special" cases as much as possible, to keep the parser fast and light-weight. So from a technical point of view, it would be better to do this:

PATTERNS:02
   NAME="my super catchy intro"
   blablabla

where NAME is a block constant, that is a command that can only be set once per block, and doesn't count towards the block length. Theoretically those exist even in the current MDAL standard, but aren't handled by libmdal. Which is another blocking issue towards adding support for various engines...

Need your help again Could you run

glxinfo | grep OpenGL

on the machine that has this problem, and post the output?

Thanks! No need to run it on your other machines actually, it was just to rule out that there's an OpenGL-related problem at hand with this issue.

I've written a report on github. Still the same. It's an ATI video card.

Edit => your fix did it, thanks!

Cheers gtap, glad you enjoy the ride so far

Yeah, unfortunately the fxtables are not very convenient/user friendly at the moment. My plan is to improve the situation with the next MDAL standard. The idea is that there'll be seperate tables for notes, dutys, etc. on the front end, and libmdal will generate the actual data tables from those input tables. Still got quite some work left on that, though.

This is on the to-do list, not just for the current block but even for the current row. However, it's not so easy to implement. For "normal" chip editors it's fairly easy because you can determine the current playback position simply by counting the vblank interrupts that have occured. However, for 1-bit this isn't possible because in most engines, there are no interrupts.

Good one, haven't thought of that before.

Do you think ctrl-v and ctrl-p should be swapped? I thought that having ctrl-v insert and shift the stuff after the cursor would be more intuitive. But I'm open to suggestions here, in any case.

This would be quite difficult to implement as such, because internally, modifiers don't exist as a seperate entity. However, I see your point and I'll try to find a solution/workaround. Need to dig into the code for the modifiers anyway because there's this problem that heoretically you should be able to enter modifiers without an associated note value, but it doesn't work

Well, originally I had Ctrl-V doing a "paste and overwrite", and the current Ctrl-V "insert" behaviour was on Ctrl-Ins. However, it appears that some newer laptop keyboards don't have an Ins key anymore (whoever came up with that bs?), so those users would have to press some akward combo involving the Fn key. Anyway, that's how the current situation came about.

I have to say that to me, the current behaviour seems more logical. If you press Ctrl-V in a text editor, the stuff after the cursor will be shifted. So that's what "paste" means to me. And of course in a music editing context, the term comes from tape reel editing. And in that context, paste means inserting a piece of tape, as opposed to "paste over". So in my opinion, having Ctrl-V paste over is wrong. However, I just checked the docs of various trackers and it seems the majority indeed does a paste-over on Ctrl-V. Guess that's what you get when 99% of tracker authors are non-native English speakers... So I suppose I should indeed adapt *sigh*

Ok guys, per popular demand™ I've swapped Ctrl+V/Ctrl+P in trunk
gtap, are you on Linux or do you need a Windows build with this change?