This one is super basic and was originally just going to be a utility within a bigger project, but it turned out so useful by itself that I wanted to share it. I'm sure not everyone has this problem, but I've found that changing the tempo after the SFX is written usually doesn't feel right - the piece ends up being built to make sense at the tempo it was created at.
To use the tap tempo tool, you decide what kind of rhythm you want to use, pick beats to tap on, figure out how many SFX lines between each beat you're tapping on, set that number appropriately, and tap it out.
(A couple examples: if I'm tapping quarter notes that I'll later subdivide into sixteenth notes, I leave it on 4 and tap every quarter note; if I'm planning to use a tresillo rhythm, 3+3+2, I set it to eight lines, tap the first beat of each group on the [x] button, and tap the other beats on the table.)
Then, when you're done tapping, you can hit [o] (z or c on keyboard, usually) to stop, reboot PICO-8, and punch in the calculated SPD to start composing with it.
If the tempo is jumping around weirdly while you're tapping, there might be some taps counting as multiple (I think the electrical engineering term is "bouncing"); increasing the "ignore gaps under" threshold will probably help stabilize it. (2 worked fine for me with PICO-8 standalone, but I found myself turning it up to 5 when I was testing it on the web just now.)
Hope it works for folks!
Edit: Figured out that I introduced a bug right before uploading - should work better now.
[Please log in to post a comment]
