Amiga Music Tracker and Player in JavaScript
BASSOON Tracker is a free web application that gives you full control over an Amiga music tracker and player.
The Commodore Amiga, the successor of the Commodore C-64 home computer, was a very popular home computer back in the 80's and 90's. Among the many strengths were excellent graphics and sound capabilities; this led to a thriving games and demo development scene.
Anyone could just fire up a free program like Soundtracker on the Amiga to start composing music or to play music on the device.
Musicians benefited from extra hardware like a sampler that you could connect to the Amiga to record new music samples.
Considering that the original Amiga had only 512 Kilobytes of memory (which you could extend), and that the memory had to be shared, it is quite astonishing how well music sounded on the Amiga.
BASSOON Tracker
Bassoon Tracker is a sound tracker for the Amiga in JavaScript. You may use it to play music and to create music of your own using it.
The interface may look intimidating on first glance; new users may want to play some of the demo songs listed on the lower left side of the interface to get a feel for the capabilities. I suggest you check out Stardust or Lotus 2 to get a feel for the capabilities.
One of the greatest strengths of the player is that its developer has added support for several popular Amiga music databases and local file playback. Just select File > Load Module, and select a song from one of the available sources.
Supported are Mod Archive, Modules.pl, Dropbox, Bassoon, and local songs. The song listings lack search capabilities though which means that you will have to scroll a lot to find songs of interest.
Another thing that is missing is support for playlists; you can only play individual songs right now.
A click on the play button starts playback right away. The player displays the entire composition in its interface while the song is playing so that you can learn a thing or two from good composers.
The song composing part of the music tracker supports major features: load, play and edit samples, use the integrated piano, edit different tracks, and save modules that you have created using the tracker.
Closing Words
BASSOON Tracker is a great web application for Amiga veterans and others interested in music and especially the Amiga music scene. Most of the features that you'd expect from a tracker are implemented already, some, like playlist support, would be really handy to improve usability.
Now You: What is your take on Amiga music and today's music?
Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?
Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.
Mike, in theory this should have only been displayed once to you, at the very first video that you played with VLC. The time this window is displayed depends largely on the number of fonts in your font directory.
huh, I lucked out for a change?? Amazing!!
Apparently VLC keeps this info through version updates, but I didn’t see this message after a fresh OS install about 8 weeks ago, & a new VLC.
yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.
Error:
Buidling font Cache pop-up
Solution:
Open VLC player.
On Menu Bar:
Tools
Preferences
(at bottom – left side)
Show settings — ALL
Open: Video
Click: Subtitles/OSD (This is now highlited, not opened)
Text rendering module – change this to “Dummy font renderer function”
Save
Exit
Re-open – done.
Progam will no longer look outside self for fonts
Source – WorthyTricks.co.cc
Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.
@Kishore, I’ll try your tips, but does this mean it will no longer show subtitles either?
I do use subtitles, but the fontcache dialog box pops up (almost) everytime I play a file.
Could this be related to the fonts I have installed? Or if I add/remove fonts to my system?
I’ll try to do a fresh install also, if your tips does no work. I’ll post back here later…
/thanks
/j
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,Dont worry, VLC is currently sorting out this issue and the next version will be out soon.
No probs @ Martin !! Its my pleasure
Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me
I am using SMplayer 0.8.6 (64-bit) (Portable Edition) on Windows 7 x64. Even with the -nofontconfig parameter in place SMplayer still scans the fonts. Also, I have enabled normal subtitles and it is still scanning fonts before playing a video. Also, it does this every time the player opens a video after a system restart (only the fist video played).
Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?