About

PortaMod by Brendan Ratliff, a.k.a. Syphus, based on IBXM by Martin Cameron (© 2008)

Fundamentally, in its most basic usage, PortaMod is a Processing implementation of IBXM aimed at allowing the Processing community to benefit from the advantages that oldschool 'tracker' formats offer.

Compared to WAV/MP3/OGG, these advantages include small file-size, the ability to synchronise visuals and other triggered events to events in the music (e.g. syncing a screenflash to a particular note, at a particular time and volume) and the possibility for allowing extensive user interaction with the music itself.

Compared to MIDI, tracked formats use instruments based on samples which sound the same on any replayer system, rather than being dependent on varying MIDI-synths. Though oldschool 4-channel chiptunes can be as small as 3 kilobytes, complex and high- quality music can be arranged in an XM of up to 32 channels, often matching mp3 quality but with a reduced filesize.

Download

Download PortaMod version 0.2 in .zip format.

Installation

Unzip and put the extracted PortaMod folder into the libraries folder of your processing sketches. Reference and examples are included in the PortaMod folder.

Examples

Here's an example of a dual-deck mod DJing app which uses PortaMod: ChipdiscoDJ Find a list of examples in the current distribution of PortaMod, or have a look at them by following the links below.

WTF

Beyond that, PortaMod builds quite heavily on IBXM in the control features it offers while retaining IBXM's efficiency and reliable handling of these formats and their idiosyncrasies. Its diverse range of functions is intended to give the Processing community a very granular relationship with tracked audio data, which can either be found amongst the gigabytes of free modules available online or created with trackers such as ProTracker (Amiga), FastTracker (MS-DOS), ScreamTracker (MS-DOS), or the modern-day and very cross-platform MilkyTracker - www.milkytracker.org

Feedback always appreciated - you can contact me via Twitter, but the best way of discussing PortaMod would be to post a comment at the bottom of this page. Also the quickest way of getting a response :)

Special thanks to Peter Quayle (parapete), Paul Carpenter (Vampire^TZT) and Anders Carlsson (goto80), for help and bugtesting; to Joey Scully (dataprole) and Jamie Allen for advice; to Martin Cameron (of course!) for IBXM :D

Tested

Platform: Windows XP, Mac OS X, Linux Processing: 1.0.1 JDK Version: 1.6 Dependencies none

Reference

Have a look at the javadoc reference here. A copy of the reference is included in the .zip as well.

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