January 13th, 2018

New Year, New Doppelplusungut, New TIA Music Driver

Happy New Year, everybody! Time for a little write-up on what I’ve been up to lately. As tradition holds, me and my collegue spent the month of December working on a new Doppelplusungut album. Actually this time marks the 10-year anniversary of our collaboration, so to celebrate the occasion, we ended up releasing a “Best of” our drone works along with the regular album. Highlights this year included dat zekt in some hilarious attempts at playing the trumpet, and writing an Audacity plug-in - without any API documentation nor knowledge of the Nyquist language. I’m telling ya, I was scratching that good ol’ head so hard!

Also I successfully participated in some music competitions again - second place in Silly Venture’s Atari VCS compo, and first place at DiHalt Lite for my beeper track made with Shiru’s new Squat engine. For the VCS track, I actually wrote a new TIA music driver. The gist with that one is that it fixes the ubiquitous detune problem by extending TIA’s native 7-bit pitch dividers to 16-bit. For those who want to try it out, an XM converter is included in the download package. By the way the converter is written in Rust, and uses xmkit, my brand-new (and probably super buggy) library crate for extracting information from XM files.

Last but not least, a service announcement - I’m planning to do some under-the-hood changes to this website’s framework in the coming weeks, so some sections/features might be temporarily broken.