I can't for the life of me figure out how sound effects or music editing works! Does anyone have any information anywhere? I suspect that if I already knew how any other tracker worked I would be able to understand this, but I do not.

I read what the manual said but it is too abstract. Can anyone give just a little more information?

Thanks

The sfx editor is quite easy to use. In graph mode you have choose the instrument (the small figures) and "draw" the sound and its volume on the 2 bar charts.
I did not try the tracker for now, but I planed to. I believe it's like the trackers we had on Amiga.

http://www.gr87.com/?page_id=64

so this manual is for a totally different tracker program, but I actually found it to be pretty helpful to grab the basics of what was going on in PICO-8

@frew: all you have to do is play around with it and try everything. you can not break anything in pico-8.

the sfx editor allows you to assemble 1-page-sequences of music. you enter notes there including gain level, effect and sound for each note (thats one line then). on top you have speed for the whole sfx and an option for looping.

with the music editor you can select which sfx to play simultaneously (4 max) over time. a pattern there is a selection of 4 sfx (4 tracks). the sequence of patterns resemble a song.

If that didn't help, please post a more detailed question.

It took me a little while to realize that the same set of patterns can be used for sound effects or music, so you can use either editor to make music. I kind of prefer the visual editor for writing out notes but the tracker-style editor lets you use the keyboard as a piano which can be useful.

@movAX13h: I'm not worried about breaking stuff :P I just can't even figure out how to hear what I've done. I've pressed all the buttons and read the manual. I will post another question after I've carefully read these answers and looked at the manual that Mozz posted.

Oh man, for the first time the space button (to play a sound) finally works! I don't even know what changed!

frew, load up one of the demo songs (I think woo.p8 was one of them) and see what they did. You can make up to 64 tracks of 32 notes in the fourth tab (switch mode to tracker in the upper left, the grid icon), then assemble those measures in the fifth tab into the four audio channels of the PICO-8.

Left and right click are used a lot to increment/decrement the pattern #, spd is the delay (starts at 1 and makes almost no sound at this speed, set it to 16 for most music), oct is the octave (0-3), the wave icons are instruments, and the other icons are effects.

In tab four, if you're looking at one note on the bottom half, it goes like this: white note (press z-m, q-i to set), gray octave (press 0-3 to set), red instrument (0-7), blue volume (0-7, 0 deletes the entry), and purple effect. Also, you can change all the instruments or effects or volume to the same value with LEFTSHIFT+click on the icon, so shift-clicking vol 0 will clear the whole track. Oh, and spacebar plays the track, but make sure spd is > 1 or you might not hear anything.

Thanks innomin, that's very helpful; knowing what the numbers and stuff are in the music tracker makes it a lot easier.

np =)

You should look at pizza's carts, he does some interesting things with track loops and arpeggio effects and instrument changes. Way beyond what I know how to do.

Hi there: Just tagging on to this thread with my own mystification with the sfx editor: I can figure out how to increment SPD by clicking on it… but how do I make it go back down?? I've tried clicking, dragging, typing numbers… any clues?

EDIT: Never mind, found it. It's click and right click.

There's this Pico-zine coming out by Arnaud. I wrote a pretty detailed tutorial on everything related to audio in PICO-8. Be on the lookout for that :)

Oh, I also made a way less detailed quick video tutorial on the tracker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMcnZ3lexKY

Maybe that'll help!