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Cart #little_drummer_toy-7 | 2024-12-10 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA
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Play music with a collection of holiday-themed samples! Or make chaotic sound collages, your choice. Export your creations and share them with others! Made for the 2024 PICO-8 Advent Calendar.

And, yes, this is a shameless demake of the Thirty Dollar Website.

Instructions

This cart uses console controls, so use the arrows, ❎ (x on keyboard), and πŸ…ΎοΈ (z/c on keyboard) to navigate.

The first two rows of icons are sounds. Press ❎ to preview a sound, or πŸ…ΎοΈ to add it to the song.

Icons in the third row control playback, and can be used to change pitch or tempo, jump to different points in the song, control looping, etc.

The bottom row of icons contains non-song actions like play, save, and undo. It also contains a help icon if you want a reminder of this information.

Use ❎ and πŸ…ΎοΈ on icons in your song for more options. ❎ options are more navigation-related, and πŸ…ΎοΈ options are more editing-related.

Saving and Loading

The big blue up arrow icon lets you save songs to the clipboard. If you're doing this on the web, you'll need to also press ctrl-c to finish the process. Share your songs anywhere - like in this thread!

To load a song, just paste it into PICO-8. Try this one: β˜‰βŽβ˜‰βŽβ˜‰βŽβ˜‰2βŽβ˜‰2βŽβ˜‰βŽβ˜‰βŽβ˜‰βŽβ˜‰1β˜‰-1β˜‰1βŽβ˜‰-1❎aβ˜…β˜…πŸ±

To reload the last song you saved or loaded, use the big blue down arrow icon. This lets you use the clipboard as a sort of checkpoint if you want.

Mac users: If you're doing this in the web player on a Mac, you'll probably have to use both ctrl-c and cmd-c (in some order) to copy, and both ctrl-v and cmd-v to paste. I think ctrl-c then cmd-c to copy, and cmd-v then ctrl-v to paste should probably work? Good luck!

Advanced Usage

  • Loops and targets: each "go to target" command will only fire once per loop. Every time you hit a loop point, all targets will refresh. You can use this behavior for complex structure in your song. Loops cannot be refreshed once they are out of iterations.

  • Chords: chord is a prefix command, that is, it comes before the sounds that should play simultaneously. (Instead of between them, like the simultaneous sound command on thirtydollar.website.) You can change the value of the chord command so it plays more or fewer sounds at once.

  • Scrolling: you should be able to use ❎ plus up and down arrows to scroll through longer songs. I haven't tested long songs and scrolling very thoroughly, so you might encounter bugs. Please let me know if so!

Also, many tips from this Thirty Dollar Website video apply to this cart as well.

Credits

Thanks to @bikibird for organizing the Advent Calendar, @SmellyFishstiks for the calendar cart, https://thirtydollar.website/ for providing pretty much of all the ideas and structure, and @Siapran for pointing me to the Thirty Dollar Website in the first place.

Sounds

All sounds were trimmed, faded, normalized, and encoded with QPA for use in this cart. Please feel free to re-use this attribution block if you need to credit this sound set elsewhere. Most sounds are CC0, but there are a few that are CC-BY.

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Such a neat cart. The kid wow sound is my favorite. Wonderful collection of sounds.

A short carol for everyone:

e11β˜‰-9βŽβ˜‰5βŽβ˜‰β˜‰2β˜‰-2β˜‰-1β˜‰-2βŽβ˜‰βŽβ§—βŽβ§—5βŽβ§—β§—2β§—-2β§—-2β§—-1βŽβ§—-4βŽΛ‡4βŽΛ‡5βŽΛ‡Λ‡1Λ‡-1Λ‡-2Λ‡-2βŽΛ‡-3βŽβ–ˆ10β–ˆβ–ˆ2❎c2β™ͺ5β™ͺ-5β™ͺ-4❎c2β™ͺ6β™ͺ-4β™ͺ-5❎c2β™ͺ10β™ͺ-5β™ͺ-3❎2la❎❎♥♥♥❎❎✽❎❎∧βŽβ™2⁙-1β§—β–₯-4❎❎❎aβ–’βŽβŽπŸ˜
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whoaaa this is rad

@luchak rest+2 before the loop, that's a clever hack ! Now I'm very tempted to write a song that ends 1/2 a tone up from the start and have it loop 50 times...
Did I miss a way to have a chord sustain for a few ticks while a melody is playing ? Maybe with tempo change ? I understand that pico8 is limited to 4 voices, but a 3 notes chord with a single note melody would be nice. Is there a trick to do it ?
Target and loops + relative notes and absolute transpose opens a whole new world of writing partitions to me, not sure what will come of it but I'm exited to try.

β˜‰-1β˜‰5β˜‰-1β˜‰3β˜‰2β˜‰-4β˜‰2β˜‰-3t-1l10sβ˜‰-1t1l10❎❎a🐱❎❎

I could be wrong here, but I think this is based off of

https://thirtydollar.website/

So you should check that out 2. :)

@RealShadowCaster There's unfortunately not a great way to get sustain going ... these are all one-shot PCM samples without loop points. Polyphony is quite high (up to 16 voices!), but each sample will just play through once.

Super fun song, too! I love what the tempo and transpose controls do in loops.

@Proatwork456 It is! I had an acknowledgement down in the credits section, but, yeah, that might have been too far down, so I just added one at the top of the post.
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I was gonna post a song here but I think I may have found a bug :O

when I export and then reimport, the "ho" (santa hat icon) note on the third-to-last row here gets changed to a "glasses" note:

Here is the exported string:

 
e8r1,,,,,,,,,,,,,,c2a●○-5a🐱5❎❎c2aβ˜…β—‹-1a🐱5❎🐱2c2a●○-10a🐱5❎❎c2aβ˜…β—‹-1a🐱2❎❎c2a●○-5a🐱-2❎❎c2aβ˜…β—‹-1a🐱2❎❎c2a●○-10a🐱5❎❎caβ˜…β—‹-1❎❎,,c2a●○a🐱7❎❎c2aβ˜…β—‹4a🐱7❎❎c2a●○-1a🐱5❎❎c2aβ˜…β—‹2a🐱2❎❎c2a●○-3a🐱❎❎gc2aβ–‘β—‹-10aβ§—βŽβŽa-16β—‹a-6β–₯g2rc2aβ–‘β—‹1a🐱5❎❎c2aβ–‘β—‹-10a🐱5❎❎😐1❎❎g1r2

EDIT: it looks like I can also easily reproduce if it I make an empty song with just that santa hat in it; exporting/importing turns it into a "glasses"
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@kittenm4ster Thank you for the bug report! It should be fixed now: I've moved the Santa hat to a different character. I was worried about this category of bug, and not only did I have one - the assert I had to catch this kind of bug was itself buggy.

This song is absolutely delightful, by the way.



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