Features

[dannye]

• Song Viewer
  • File parsing
    • Support modern pokecrystal macro syntax
    • Bonus: Handle TCG-compatibility macros used by pokered-crysaudio
    • Validate song header
    • Detect invalid macros/arguments
    • Detect nested loops/calls
  • Render notes for all channels
    • Visualize settings changes with colored flags
    • Visualize loops and calls with wrapper boxes
    • Visualize unreferenced labels
    • Visualize tempo changes
  • Customizable timeline
    • Multiple zoom levels
    • Key labels
    • Note labels
    • Configurable Measure ruler
    • Adjustable grid line spacing
    • Theme picker
    • Full screen

• Song Player
  • Real-time playback with reasonably accurate tempo, volume, vibrato, etc.
  • Process custom channel 3 wave_samples.asm
  • Process custom channel 4 drumkits.asm
  • Start/resume from any point
  • Loop infinitely
  • Detect when subsequent iterations of the main loop are not exactly identical to the first
  • Mute individual channels during playback
  • Stereo/Mono output
  • Bookmarks
  • Support remaining miscellaneous commands: pitch_sweep, duty_cycle_pattern, pitch_offset

• Song Editor
  • New Song dialog with customizable options
  • Channel selector (only the selected channel may be edited)
  • Multi-note selection
  • Rectangle select
  • Basic note operations (move, resize, put, delete)
  • Edit note properties (speed, volume, vibrato, etc.)
  • Pencil Mode (draw and erase notes)
  • Format Painter (copy note properties from one note to another)
  • Undo/Redo
  • Resize song
  • Make and unmake loops and calls
    • Loops: Reduce, Extend, Unroll, Create
    • Calls: Delete, Unpack, Create, Insert
  • Transfer selection of notes from one channel to another
  • Add/Remove channels

• Extras
  • Channel 3 wave editor
  • Channel 4 drumkit editor
  • General sound effect editor
  • MIDI device input/MIDI file import

[nehochupechatat]

What do you think of implementing a General MIDI export?
With instrumentation similar to Joao Buaes' MIDIs

[dannye]

What do you think of implementing a General MIDI export?

It isn't really useful and doesn't really serve the purpose of this editor. The primary goal of this editor is to directly edit/export *.asm song files for immediate use in a pokecrystal-based project. So that you can press "Save" in Crystal Tracker and immediately run make on your project and instantly have a new ROM file with your new song modifications included.

MIDI editors exist for creating MIDI files.

[nehochupechatat]

Ah, I understand. What about implementing a "traditional tracker" view? I.e OpenMPT, Furnace, etc
Some musicians prefer to work that way + your tracker is already based off OpenMPT

[dannye]

There are several problems with trying to imagine this working with a traditional tracker view. The Pokemon song data format is not well suited for it.

Most fundamentally is that in Pokemon, the song channels are completely independent from each other. One channel can loop a small pattern many times while another channel plays a long sequence of all unique notes. It's also possible for a channel's entire body to be much shorter than another channel's body (ie, the short channel may fully repeat many times in the time that it takes the longer channel to play once). In fact, the channels are so independent that there is no requirement that all the channels loop back to the start at the same point in time -- or that they even loop back to the same point at the beginning.

So the concept of a "row" can't really apply here in the way that it would need to for a traditional tracker view to be effective.

[duckiedev]

Would it be possible to add an option under the View menu that can be toggled on and off to display the note + octave as shown in the mock-up below?

[dannye]

@duckiedev It would be possible but my preference is to keep the list of toggles pretty modest, and I prefer the current behavior of just pitches over pitches+octaves.

[dotmatrixgirl]

Trackers such as Klystrack and Goattracker 2 support different pattern length/count per channel, so that block could be overcome.

[dannye]

I'm afraid you've missed the point. I'm saying the entire concept of "patterns", the "order", and a "row" are not applicable here.

The channels each have their own independent speed ("ticks per row"), which can change arbitrarily. They each have independent "loops", and "subroutines", and "loops nested inside of subroutines", and "subroutines nested inside of loops", and independent total durations, and independent "starting points" to loop back to at the end.

They have no clear and obvious points of separation between so-called "patterns". Each channel is just a massive sequence of commands+notes.

The channels are so utterly desynced from each other that many, many sacrifices would have to be made to create anything resembling a tracker view; to the point that it would be barely any better than a text editor. The amount of effort to create a GUI for such a view is very obviously not worth it.

You could imagine an *.asm song file that is so well structured that it uses a bunch of subroutines (the "patterns") and uses a long list of calls (the "order") to arrange the subroutines, but this editor seeks to support all valid pokecrystal *.asm song files.