I was wandering if there was a way to expand the music editor? I'm definitely not musically literate but I do want more channels and I can't find a tracker that works well for me. All I want is a more channels.

run two copies of PICO-8! :P

seriously though, PICO-8 has four channels, take it or leave it...sorry...unless there is some hidden secret mode, but SFX secrets have been pretty thoroughly mined at this point.

you can do a surprising amount with just the four channels though. it's part of the fun! :)

is there any way to extract the editor and edit it myself? Like if i wanted to use the editor for non pico 8 games

it's not open source if that's what you are asking...you can create music in PICO-8 and then export it as WAV and use that however you want, e.g. in a non-PICO-8 game

so if you were using PICO-8 purely as a music creation tool, I suppose you could export > 4 tracks and mix them together :)

Great thank you!

As kittenm4ster said I would look into getting more out of those 4 channels as-is. There are tricks that have been used since the C64 and NES that can get some really nice sounds out of it. For example, you can do an instrument+echo on just one channel, if for every main note you have space later on to place a second copy of it at a lower volume. A pattern that works pretty well is note1-rest-note2-echo1-note3-echo2 etc. I used it on a channel in my song here: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=48761&tid=30702

If you want to use the music made by it in other games, I would record your computer's audio and edit it into an MP3. You can do this by running a cable from your speaker to your microphone, or with mixer tools in your audio control panel, or even recording video of your Pico-8 game by pressing F8 and extracting the audio from that.

EDIT: Didn't notice the wav export in the manual earlier, that's cool too.

Hey iv'e actually played that cart before, thought those names sounded familiar