[video src="5/Bassoontracker05.mp4"]

I picked up one of my old projects again: BassoonTracker!

BassoonTracker is some sort of music sequencer in the "tracker" tradition.

Very retro, very geeky - I love it :-)

Most people - including me - use it more to listen to other peoples' songs than to create their own, so I polished the "playing experience" a bit and added playlists, amongst others.
Above is a small video of the new stuff on version 0.5.
Check out the full changelist of this release at the history page.

Underneath the surface, the code also got a mayor and long overdue overhaul: I moved to ES modules, making the code much easier to maintain and much easier to expand.
As a result, the initial footprint is much smaller - coming in at 97kb compressed - which is quite nice for an app that

• has a complete custom graphical UI rendering engine
• has a complete custom audio engine
• can read and write various old and weird binary file formats

For the past months, tracked music is more or less on non-stop repeat when I'm working as - for me - it's the perfect coding music. (After all; it's code itself !)
I like the fact that tracked songs are by nature open source: playback is in real time generated from the source samples, the musical notes and the effects.
If you hear an interesting part, you can instantly investigate how it was done.

Because tracked music comes from a time where diskspace was limited, the files are usually very small and don't contain long samples or lyrics, making them even more perfect as coding backgroiund.

I must say it makes me surprisingly happy that the BassoonTracker source code repository jumped the 1000-star marker recently.


Yay! I'm glad people still like tracked music.
(Check out this playlist with "demoscene releases" of this year - it really is a vibrant scene ! )

The BassoonTracker app can be found here - source code is here.