Multimedia Mike

It's true that FLAC could still carry metadata (whether in raw FLAC or Ogg container). But this project is all about reducing friction for the end user (I've heard the user experience design philosophy summed up with the maxim "don't make me think!").

Absolutely, the metadata would be preserved. If the program wrote to an m4a/mp4 file, it could output an iTunes-compatible metadata block. I think the biggest concern with this feature would be deciding the specific audio format to use: The choices would be raw PCM, MP3, AAC, or Apple Lossless.

One feature I have thought of adding is an "Export Song" or "Export Album" button (the latter would export all songs in a game). It would be possible to simply generate the audio and dump it to files on the user's hard drive. There are a few usability matters to work out first, though. (What format should it dump? Raw PCM in WAV or MP4? Then the user has to recompress to MP3 or AAC. Should the program compress it? What format and settings?) I wonder if that would be a worthwhile feature to pursue?

Remember that website I created that allows users to listen to chiptunes directly through their [Chrome] web browsers? The primary problem I wanted to solve was to make it easy for people to listen to chiptunes. I recently realized that a side effect of the project was creating an impressive online database of chiptunes and their metadata, and making it all searchable. I decided to publish an API to access all this juicy chiptune data. The technical details are explained here: http://multimedia.cx/eggs/chiptune-database-and-api/ At this point, I have to wonder: Does anyone still listen to chiptunes? What offline players are you using? Is everyone behind Chipamp? I ask because my hope is that the authors of these offline chiptune players would be able to leverage this database to make it easier for their users to locate and play their favorite video game music.

How did you look at the code? Did you view source on the website? Because that's not the code that actually plays the music. You can view the player code on Github. As you can see, it's already C/C++ and could easily be ported to Objective-C. However, it already shares a lot of code with Audio Overload (incorporating AOSDK, in fact). I assume Audio Overload is the premiere chiptune playing app for the Mac platform. Do you have any specific complaints/suggestions for improvement? I admit I haven't tried it yet, but I plan to soon.

I can't quite tell from your post: Does Chrome/Mac work for you and are you able to use the site as it stands? Or are you still using a PPC-based Mac (where this player wouldn't work)? Is the issue that you're just looking for a better native Mac app for playing chiptunes? Because I don't think porting these players to JavaScript would facilitate native desktop apps (unless using something like Adobe AIR).

I just wanted to bump this thread and let everyone know that I'm still actively working on the game music appreciation website and making improvements: http://gamemusic.multimedia.cx/ Most recently: Power user feature: Voice toggling hotkeys: I know voice toggling is a popular feature, and you can now toggle voices with the number keys on your keyboard. Numbers 1-9 and 0 correspond to voices 1-10, respectively (no hotkeys for channels numbered higher than 10, which is only a problem for Nintendo DS chiptunes, but those behave differently anyway). No more 2:30-length sound effects: A lot of chiptunes initially added to the database didn't have play length metadata and were given a default play length of 2m30s. This was especially a problem for Game Boy chiptunes. I overhauled the database with better estimates for these songs. A/V sync is vastly improved on Windows platform. Audio stutter when starting a new track is also solved. Lower CPU usage, especially if the player window is not viewable. Also eliminated glitch when switching back to the player tab. I've started working with some in the ripping/dumping community for better coverage. The website even hosts a few SNES sets that have not made it to snesmusic.org yet because they don't work with the official SNES player that the site uses. (For the curious, these include: We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story, Clayfighter 2, Mickey's Playtown Adventure; let's hear some remixes now! ) Sorry the site is still so ugly. After I get all the functionality and songs in there, I'll try to make it pretty.

Yep, I found that post last night thanks to referrer logs and made an account already. Thanks for spreading the word. I'm eager to engage with the community over there. Regrettably, they have not yet approved my account (same manual approval process that is found here on OCRemix forums). I guess I can't fault them thanks to spammers, trolls, and other internet ne'er-do-wells.

Reproduced, and placed on my bug tracker. It's so addictive for me to develop it. I meant to take a break from working on it after I released it last week. But that didn't happen, and probably won't happen anytime soon; people keep finding bugs and coming up with more suggestions.

This was also seen in some SNES games. One that always stands out is Battletoads in Battlemaniacs. Try disabling all but one channel and you'll still hear a diversity of instruments. I have no reason to keep this all to myself, so I'll be happy to develop some method to make it easily embeddable on other sites. The most likely scenario is that you will point visitors to the Chrome Web Store link for the player. The player commandeers some MIME types (that I invented, so no one will think the player has unjustly hijacked them). As long as you serve a chiptune using the right MIME type, and the embedding web page's JavaScript knows how to talk to the player, it should just work. Oh, and I also created a few new chiptune container formats for this project. That might complicate matters, but hopefully not by much. I still need to test it all and write it up. I'm glad there's interest, though.

Good news! The latest version of the game music player (v1.1.0.0, which should be auto-updated by the time you read this) supports toggling individual voices on Nintendo DS games. Bad news! It really isn't very useful. So far, all of the DS games I have studied use some kind of MIDI / channel scheduling scheme in which the next note is output on the next channel that happens to be free. Thus, if you disable all but one voice, you will hear a wide variety of instruments, not just, e.g., the rhythm or the bass line. Still, the feature is there if you want to play around with it.

I'm still finding bugs with some DS games (Sangokushi DS 2 is still silent). Please report any other DS problems you come across. Sure thing. I still need to harvest a bunch of files from that site (all the Genesis material on gamemusic.multimedia.cx came from smd.joshw.info). I tried to add Skies of Arcadia to my site but I encountered problems. So, boo for that. OTOH, thanks for exposing new bugs in my processes! I'll try to get Skies working soon.

I posted a new update to the player. This version fixes playback for a bunch of Nintendo DS games. One such problematic game was Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. I was eager to hear the original Turnabout Sisters' Theme, on which several great site remixes are based. Fortunately, updates to the player should be auto-updated. Channel toggling for Nintendo DS games is coming soon (it works, but comically, the main player never accounted for the fact that a system might have more than 10 channels).

Awesome. I'm glad to get solid feedback about which feature I should work on next!

If anyone is interested in the technical stuff, I have posted the source code of the underlying web browser-based player (called SaltyGME).

Thanks for the kind words. I know the feeling of finding gold in this database-- I often play with the "Random" button and end up hearing great music I never would have encountered otherwise. I'd love to know what people would like to see (hear?) next. In particular, if you know of a missing chiptune for an already supported system (e.g., you know of an SNES set that I missed), please point me to the download. I would eventually like to bring the player in line, feature-wise, with OCRemix's Chipamp plugin. I know it's possible; it will just take time. The next system catalogs likely to be added are: PlayStation 1 & 2, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, TurboGrafx-16 / PC Engine, MSX, and Atari SAP. These are next on the list because the player already supports them; adding the catalogs is a matter of wrangling the metadata and staging the chiptunes. The following phase will be GBA, C64 SID, Atari ST / Amiga sc68, Atari ST YM, WonderSwan, and X68000. The system list gets pretty obscure. But I have both the player code and song collections available, so I might as well go for it.

Good news: I looked into the software library that handles the DS music. It should be pretty straightforward to get channel toggling working there and I will try to include that in a future player version. It looks like the DS supports 16 channels. I guess I should display the voices in 2 columns of 8.

I promise it's as cool as you think it is. Doing the equivalent plugin for Firefox would be quite a bit of work that I'm not prepared to do. Try out Chrome; you won't be disappointed. Both the browser and this player extension are extremely simple to install, whether you're on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

If my little game music website project facilitates the creation of more awesome game remixes for ocremix.org, all the work I put into the website will be worth it. Good luck!

Thanks! Are you referring to the ability to mute individual channels of the chiptune? Unfortunately, it's a limitation of whatever player library I happen to be leveraging. The one for playing Nintendo DS chiptunes (Vio2sf) doesn't expose any switches for toggling voices. One day, I may dig into the engine and change that. Then again, for some of the more advanced consoles, the voices column of the player could get unwieldy. I seem to recall that the Dreamcast's audio coprocessor was capable of processing 64 digital channels!

As it stands, it should be possible to play songs on arbitrary sites as long as the extension is installed. However, it takes some cooperation between the extension and the JavaScript on a page. I still need to document it all (and probably refine/simplify/debug it all). Plus, I need to dump all the player source code into Github so anyone can do with it as they wish. Thanks so much! (Aside: Big fan of your remixes.) I'm glad that this has been a seamless experience for at least one user. Frictionless-ness was a huge goal. I know what you mean about discovering new soundtracks. In the 3 months I have been working on this project, that random button has introduced me to possibly more awesome soundtracks than when I was an avid gamer in the 8-/16-bit era.

Awhile back, I posted that I was working on a way to allow people to play chiptunes directly in their browsers. I'm pleased to show off the fruits of those efforts thus far: http://gamemusic.multimedia.cx/ This is a website that includes a player extension that a user can (hopefully) easily install and a database of several thousand chiptunes. Thus far, the site catalogs tunes from NES, SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, Nintendo DS, Saturn, and Dreamcast. I plan to add a lot more system support (bringing it in line with Chipamp eventually) and the chiptunes to match. But I would like to solicit feedback on the work so far. Thanks.

A quick update: I am still committed to making this happen. I was about to make it happen when I first posted a few weeks ago. djpretzel encouraged me to try to get some more feature support into the player to bring it closer in line with the real Chipamp. So I've been working on that. Anyway, if anyone wants a peek at what I'm working on, drop me a PM or email. I hope to release something public soon that can support a wide enough set of formats (and a decent database to back it up) and then be able to add more formats and features as requested.

Flash would be my second choice for this, right behind Chrome Native Client, which is what I'm using. Going the pure JS/HTML5 route would entail: Getting the engines ported to JavaScript (the ActionScript ports might help with this, otherwise, huge chore); then there's audio output which would require separate backends for the experimental audio APIs that both Firefox and Chrome are deploying, plus there would probably need to be a Flash audio output "fallback" (which seems to be how many HTML5 apps current do audio). And that's not even getting into visualization (not necessary, but it is nice to have). It probably can be done with pure 'HTML5' (or rather, a combination of tech that often contribute to the overall HTML5 buzzword), but it would be a lot more work, and likely not anywhere near as performant.

Can you give more details about how this was accomplished? Was it an elaborate tileset swap with the original SMB ROM, or from a newer SMB engine, or an original work altogether?