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1

Wanted: Music for Projects / Re: Wanted: Experienced tracker musicians to collaborate on a new web based tracker.

« on: December 29, 2016, 14:25:33 »

Really cool tool here-- I actually had the exact same idea (albeit based on protracker) a couple of months back and started working on something called ReacTracker, which was going to be a multi-user collaborative web tracker made using React. I actually bought the domain and everything but nothing ever really came of it.

Good luck on this though, looks pretty awesome!

Thanks.

Coincidentally, I tried using React too, after giving up on Angular (which I'm much more familiar with). I like React, it has some great features and capabilities, and keeps things relatively simple, but I found that it still got in the way of raw performance needed for something like this. When I found myself sidestepping all the React features, overusing shouldComponentUpdate() to override the decision making of React in favour of my own, I decided that this use case probably requires more low-level development. It's now developed in relatively low-level Javascript, using a mixture of HTML/CSS and Canvas, with a small, controlled sprinkling of signals/slots and immutable. Means I have absolute visibility and control over what is happening, when.


Paul

2

Wanted: Music for Projects / Wanted: Experienced tracker musicians to collaborate on a new web based tracker.

« on: December 28, 2016, 19:43:50 »

Hi All,

I posted here a short while ago about a new project I'm working on to create a FastTracker 2 style application as a web based tool, tentatively called "WeTracker".

http://wetracker.herokuapp.com
https://pgregory.github.io/wetracker/
https://github.com/pgregory/wetracker

While it is still early days in it's development, it is already fairly complete in terms of .xm format support, it runs most of the common effects, and has a basic pattern and instrument editor. I don't think it's quite at the stage yet where someone could create music from scratch, but it's not far off.

I'm looking for someone with the musical talent, and experience of using tracker software, to guide the direction of the application from this point forward. Up to now I've basically been defining the roadmap by looking at other trackers and aiming to get to some level of basic feature parity. What I really want to do now is to start adding features and improving current functionality based more on real world requirements, defined by people actually using it and finding it's limitations and/or suggesting useful new features.

I'm very much a hacker at heart, I can deal with most of the coding requirements, but with the best will in the world, I'm not yet a musician. The project would benefit greatly from creative input by the sort of people who might actually use it.

If anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask, I'll happily respond to anyone either here or through my github account.


Cheers


Paul

3

Software Showcase / WeTracker - an open source project to build an online, collaborative tracker

« on: December 07, 2016, 11:40:09 »

Hi,

Hope I'm posting to the right place. A little background if you'll indulge me, I'm a long time software developer, started back in the Amiga days, and always been a fan of creative software, I like nothing more than seeing something I've created used to make amazing things, be that graphical, musical, or some other art form. For various reasons I've been drawn back to an interest in track style music creation recently and felt that there is a gap for something that is more accessible, as in "use it anywhere you happen to be" accessible, and collaborative. I envisage a setup where creative teams can work on a composition even if they are thousands of miles away and in different time zones.

To explore this idea, I've started an open source project, called WeTracker. It's hosted on github, here, (https://pgregory.github.io/wetracker/), there is a simple web page here, (https://pgregory.github.io/wetracker/), and the current, very early, development test is hosted on Heroku here, (https://wetracker.herokuapp.com/).

It is very, very, early in development, the audio engine is based on a1k0n's jsxm (https://github.com/a1k0n/jsxm) but is likely to change, or at least evolve. The interface is early stage, it has been rebooted a couple of times to find the sweet spot of performance and utility, it may change again, although I hope not. See the web site for a basic explanation of what it can currently do, and how to use what is there.

I'd welcome any feedback and thoughts on both the concept and the current implementation. Of course, as an open source project, more than happy to consider contributions too if there are any interested programmers out there who feel this could have legs.


Cheers


Paul