Based on the PortaMod library for Processing, which is based on the IBXM Java replayer by Martin Cameron (© 2008)
Yikes, this is a bit of a mess. Chipdisco has been gathering dust for a long time now, although I'm pleased to say that a couple of people have been using it regularly and that, when I try it out every few years, it's always seemed to work! (On Windows and MacOS, at least - I've had reports of issues running it on Linux, though also some reports of Linux success...).
So it's on GitHub now, and the VERY messy Java source herein is a sort of grotesque artefact of my attempts to learn OOP by trial and error over 10 years ago. I've also included the most recent releases, which I imagine will be what most people will want - though you can also find my MIDI map, Korg nanoKontrol template and example playlists here in case you want to experiment with those features of Chipdisco. Actually getting this project running in Eclipse might not be too difficult, though my most recent version of Eclipse is from 2013 and I'm not interested in upgrading... Until I get a chance to gather some of the dependency libraries together and add them to the repo, you'll see from my .classpath that they're all over the place - some are Processing core libs, some are 3rd party Processing libs, some are 3rd party Java libs entirely, but the reasonably determined enthusiast should be able to piece together the build chain by looking at that file and doing a bit of googling. Good luck!
_~ Brendan Ratliff, 2019_
No installation is needed, but to start Chipdisco with your chosen preferences preloaded, just copy the file chipdisco_config.txt to your home directory:
~/username or /home/username on Linux ~/username or /Users/username on OS X \Documents and Settings\username on Windows XP and \Users\username on Windows Vista and 7
then edit it if you want (the options are all explained in the file), then run Chipdisco6!
QUICK START GUIDE: load modules into either deck with with ADD or by dragging/dropping them onto the decks from your computer. Both decks default to CUE MIX mode (see below) and will play out of your right speaker or headphone when you double-click the file in the playlist. CUE MIX VOLUME adjusts the overall listening volume. The BPM slider adjusts the module's tempo while the small slider in the centre of the app transposes the pitch of the module up or down by 12 semitones each way. The '+' and '-' buttons are for fine adjustments of the BPM. The '!' button on each deck forces the other deck's BPM to match the first deck's BPM. Hitting spacebar will force both modules to jump to pattern 0 - if the BPMs are the same, this should theoretically synchronise them. Use with care :)
Once you're ready to send a deck to main playout (the left audio channel - in a live situation you'd plug this into the PA from a DJ splitter cable or similar), hit the button with the speaker icon to exit CUE MIX mode for that deck. Once a deck is in PLAYOUT or FOH (front of house) mode, the crossfader will affect its volume in the normal way. The big volume faders in the centre set overall maximum levels for each deck's playout.
Have fun! DJ those chiptunes and doskpop classics until somebody asks you to stop! And then keep doing it! For ever!
What's changed? Loads of stuff, particularly:
This is a good idea for most MP3 DJ apps, but was baffling unintuitive for Chipdisco.
It was difficult to see on most screens and now it fills a 1280x800 screen (like my Macbook's, for instance) perfectly
Processing are ditching support for this and applet security keeps getting tighter and fiddlier. And Chipdisco doesn't need to be a browser app, let's face it.
The playlist has been greatly improved although some small things have been lost - the ability to remove items, for instance, is temporarily gone. Overall, though, it's more solid. M3U loading and saving is still there, but I've removed all the URL-based stuff that existed in the (pointless) browser version. Also, you now need to make sure that your playlists don't contain metadata lines (beginning with '#') - this can be done easily in a text editor, and Chipdisco saves its M3U files properly formatted. M3U files are just text files with file paths on separate lines. Chipdisco normally needs fully-qualified paths (e.g. /Users/yourname/Mods/file.mod or C:/Mods/file.mod) but I suppose it should work with relative paths too - I haven't tried that yet. M3U files saved from Chipdisco will always reflect the filepath as it was added (by file or by loading an M3U). Oh, and you can now scroll big playlists with the mousewheel/trackpad - hooray!
Simple, but great - Chipdisco now looks for a file called chipdisco_config.txt in your user home directory. A template is included in the Chipdisco distribution - just copy or move it to your homedir. It's annotated with explanations of various things. I'll try to keep current parameters the same in future updates to Chipdisco so as not to ruin your old configs. Chipdisco will never write to this config file or overwrite it entirely, but it's probably still a good idea to keep a backup. Amongst other things, this file lets you do things like define startup playlists based on M3U files or directories full of modules, define your MIDI device choices (once you've discovered in Chipdisco which numbers your chosen devices have) and defining your preferred choice of crossfader curve.
As well as being a potential source of crashes at the best of times, this was one of the many things that Apple's notoriously declinatory rendered unusable. The solution is a HUGE tradeoff...but one I'm quite happy with. Now, all 4-channel MODs are fully panned right for cue-mix or left for FOH playout. XMs with panning envelopes or pattern pan commands go haywire with this, which effectively rules out most XMs for DJ-style playback. I might add a button to disable this functionality so Chipdisco can be used as a straightforward player, but hey, there are other - better - mod players available for that :) So it means that while Chipdisco can now be used for DJing with only a splitter cable from a single soundcard (and only using a single mono channel in a venue's mixing desk), it can pretty much only be used for modules without in-pattern pan commands.
Well, the fact is...Cue Mix never really worked in the first place. It often caused crashes, particularly when Java implementations on differing platforms/versions failed to properly acquire audio devices at the OS level. And on top of that, because of the unavoidable timing glitches introduced during the audio device switch due to having to empty one buffer and fill another, when you synced up the perfect beatmatch and then switched the second tune from your headphones to the main playout...it was out of sync! Which completely defeated the point of the feature and made it useless. Now, though, we're not changing audio devices - we're simply adjusting the panning on two MODs that are playing through the same interface. Now we can do all that syncing, crossfading, cue-mixing etc. simply through pan and volume controls - which are simply hooks into the patterndata as it's processed, basically introducing artificial per-note volume and panning commands right before the whole thing is mixed and sent to the audio interface. It's CPU-light, it never causes crashes, and it will work on any machine capable of running Java apps and playing sound. Brilliant!
Not none, but you'll find that XMs with pan envelopes on instruments or channel pan commands (which is most of them) will not submit to my pan-mixing trick. They'll fight back and lots of notes will leak into the wrong channel. However, some few XMs might work, and you can probably also edit XMs to make them work - probably by using Milkytracker to strip out all pan commands/envelopes. Obviously it might completely ruin the module's sound and be a huge timewaster (unless I write an app that batch-strips pan instructions out of XM files, but that's obnoxious and destructive so I won't). One last thing I could - and might - do is to just try and strip that stuff out at the module load time in Chipdisco. Watch this space...
- Loads of little changes, including the removal of the 'spectrum' display (which was never a true spectrum but was close enough), to optimise performance. The sourcecode has been reduced from about 3000 lines to about 2000 lines, which is enormously cathartic.
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As I've explained, cue mixing now works differently but so does volume. By default, modules - when double-clicked - are loaded into the deck and played in CUE mode, which should be audible through the RIGHT stereo channel of your computer's audio output. If you're wearing headphones, you should hear this on the right; if you're set up using a splitter cable, you should get this in mono through your headphones while the mono feed to the mixing desk is silent.
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In CUE mode, moving this deck's volume fader won't do anything, nor will moving the crossfader. Adjust the CUE mode volume using the - you guessed it - CUE MIX VOLUME knob! Due to the weird library I use for knobs and sliders, you have to click and move this horizontally to turn it. There is also a MIDI mapping for this control, which I choose to assign to the knob on channel 9 of my Korg nanoKontrol. CUE MIX VOLUME applies to any module played in CUE mode on either deck.
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The button with the speaker icon changes a deck to FOH mode. In FOH, or non-CUE mode (FOH stands for 'front of house', which you can think of as what is heard over the PA system in a venue), the volume faders DO control the decks' volume. They also act as a global cap for each deck, so that the crossfader will never bump a deck's volume beyond that set by the fader. This is all standard stuff for a DJ mix setup, but I'm explaining it in detail because Chipdisco didn't previously work like this!
Sharp readers will be wondering whether shoving two modules, each in MONO, down a single MONO audio channel could cause a bit of distortion...and they'd be right. At the cost of some volume resolution, all modules are now volume-capped at 48/64, if you imagine 64 as being the full volume of a module (C40 in the pattern). That's 3/4 of the default playout volume, but you can crank things up on the mixer, possibly use a headphone amp if you really need to, and you shouldn't suffer unwanted distortion even if beatmatching two modules comprised solely of square waves :)
I'll add these as I think of them. One thing: drag'n'drop to add tunes may cause a tiny gap in playback, which you probably don't want during live performance. Using the Add button should be fine, but the best thing is always to have prepared a playlist in advance
I need to fix some keyboard mappings and possibly some of the MIDI assignments. I also need to experiment with brutally forcing all XMs and S3Ms to hard-pan left or right (as discussed above) - until I do, Chipdisco is basically an Amiga MOD DJ app rather than a MOD/XM/S3M DJ app! Oh yeah, and I need to get the JVM exit hook to work so I can get rid of that awful glitch sound of the buffer emptying when the program is ended. Meanwhile, if you don't like it, just pause both decks before quitting :)
For some reason, the Processing application building plugin I'm using sets LSUIPresentationMode on OS X to 4, which hides all OS UI elements (like the Dock and the menubar). This will almost always be unwanted so at the moment, I'm manually adjusting the Mac app's Info.plist to 0, which shows everything. If I forget to do this on a release build, that's how to fix it...