- I didn't feel like there was a good interface between tracker-based chip music composition and MML-based composition.
- I wanted to write music for the Genesis and didn't have any good way to do so.
I don't like starting things and not finishing them. However, much as I hate to admit it, I think that I was a little too ambitious when I set out to write MMLTracker. My thesis work doesn't leave me with a lot of spare time, and writing hairy high-performance C++ code all day drains me of most of my motivation to hack in C++ at night. In light of VGM Music Maker's release, it's also not clear to me that MMLTracker would now fill a niche that desperately needs filling.
So, is MMLTracker dead? Maybe, maybe not. I might come back to it later, but it will probably be a great deal later. I've got a couple of other side projects that I want to work on first.
There's still a great deal of technical debt to be paid off on Boomslang, but I feel like I can get that to the point where I'm comfortable with its condition pretty quickly. I'm also working on a suite of utilities for LSDJ called lsdj-sav-utils that I feel will be really useful to a lot of people, and I want to get that out as quickly as I can.
In an effort to have my cake and eat it, I'm going to try to build MML export into lsdj-sav-utils; that way, you can export LSDJ projects as MML files. This should help to bridge at least some of the gap that MMLTracker was trying to bridge with a lot less programming effort on my part. MML support is, however, a low-priority feature. I'm more focused on things like instrument and wave import and export and project merging as first-order features.
The source code for MMLTracker, such as it is, will remain up on Google Code if anyone wants to pick up the ball and run with it. I'm going to concentrate on getting my other side projects out the door, and then spend my spare time actually trying to make some music instead of spending all my time writing software.
Hi! I am interested in your MML Tracker. I generally use Tracker style software, and the folks who I have talked to about trying to track new tunes for the PC Engine have said "Eh, use MML". So having a bridge between the two seems like a good thing.
ReplyDeleteI'm kind of iffy about the PC Engine tracker that is out there already: Deflemask. It has a lot of cool features, but other trackers I have used handle the same sorts of things more elegantly. (And a programmer friend of mine who looked at it said it was awful for being closed-source, too).
Anyway, I'm not sure what this message really accomplishes other than saying Hey, Cool Tracker Idea. I'm glad it's up on Google Code, and thanks for sharing your work thusfar!