September 12th, 2017

Introducing Bintracker

After ten months of silently slaving away on the keyboard, the time has come to reveal my latest creation. Lo and behold: bintracker, an open-source, cross-platform music editor for low-level sound routines, and a visual front end for the MDAL project.

Currently, bintracker supports just a few of my recent ZX Spectrum beeper engines, including betaphase, PhaserX, PhaseSqueek, and the brand-new, triangle wave generating Pytha engine, which I silently released a couple of months ago. In the future, I hope to add many more ZX beeper engines, as well support for other platforms such as the TI graphing calculators.

Almost everything in bintracker is written from scratch in modern C++, including the (presently not very accurate) ZX Spectrum emulation. The only external code comes from Allegro5 serving as a portable graphics library, and pugixml which takes care of parsing MDAL configuration files. I chose Allegro5 over SDL2 simply because compiling the minimal SDL2 example already gave me a dozen memory leaks or so. Probably none of these posed any serious issue, but I still prefer to not burden myself with the technical debt of third parties. Also, while Allegro5 does have some issues on its own, the clean and well-designed interface and outstanding documentation are a huge plus in my book.

Well, what are you waiting for? Download your free copy of bintracker today and get trackin’! And please let me hear about any bugs you find as well as your feature requests on the 1-bit Forum or through the issue tracker on github.