Friday 2 September 2011

Playing with Pixitracker

Pixitracker is one of the examples included in the coding software Pixilang developed by Sunvox creator Alex Zolotov. Pixilang (and things built in Pixilang) can run on Windows, Linux, WinCE/windows mobile OSX, and has just, as of yesterday been updated to version 3. Pixitracker is a sample based tracker with a really intuitive GUI and enough features to make it useful whilst maintaining a simplicity that means you instantly get to arranging patterns without getting bogged down in patching and effects and stuff..I like it. The original Pixitracker file runs in an average PDA screen size of 240 x 240 pixels (as above) and as I've been using it on my Jornada I wanted to make some changes...now I am no coder...I've done a bit of object oriented stuff in synth building enironments but thats about it...However reading the documentation here and looking at the Pixitracker code I managed to make a few Jornada useful changes.
So as you may see (click the image above to see it's actual size) I've increased a lot of the sizes of the GUI elements making placing notes etc a lot easier and increased it's size overall to 640 x 240 to utilise the Jornada screen, I've also increase the step length of each pattern to 32 and also increased the number of Patterns to 14, having discovered how to do this could also make versions to do alternative time signatures etc. Finally I messed about with the colourscheme a bit just for kicks. I'm not going to put the code up for this as I reckon if I can work out how to do this.... anyone can!

3 comments:

kid versus chemical said...

Thats rad, I love pixitracker. 32 steps is much better. One thing I never understood...are the sounds in PT samples, or are they some kind of sample based synthesizer (like wavetables made from arrays etc)? Could you tell from looking at the code?

concretedog said...

Yay another Pixitracker user! I reckon from the code (I may be way off the mark with this) that the sounds in PT when you execute it are from code but obviously you can load wavs to replace them.

NightRadio said...

Now available for iOS!