Hell Labs

I got myself a guitar a long time ago in the hopes that I would someday learn how to play it, but it stayed in its case for years. Until now — after hearing Santiago talking about guitars all day for weeks (and even Miura telling how much fun he had with Wii Music) I decided to give it a try. Using the method from the Guitar Hero School of Music, I just picked up a tune that sounded easy enough — the Munsters TV series theme — and tried to match the notes with little knowledge and awful technique. My version is a mix of the first season, second season and Straitjackets versions of the theme, with some lines of cheesy Spanish dub from an episode and island mallets throwed in just for fun. Together with the bad guitar playing, this is guaranteed to make Jack Marshall spin in his grave, so my apologies in advance.

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Strange things you do amidst a depressive crisis when you brain doesn’t act quite the way it should act under normal circumstances.

• You write code quickly and obsessively. (In a few days I started to write two small utilities, one to manipulate partitions in a hard disk image and other that allows userspace access to filesystem images without loop-mouting them. These can be useful for some in-house projects, so this forced recovery gave me the much sought-after time to implement them.)
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Today at lunch boto handled me a QNX Neutrino 6.3.2 CD he was using in virtualization tests for Red Hat. I quickly installed it on a spare machine to see how well xmp would build on it — and it built quite well. After fixing some trivial build problems I examined the new sound system used in QNX6 (since the old drivers for QNX4 didn’t compile), and I was pleased to find that it’s based on the old ALSA 0.5 API. Xmp has an ALSA 0.5 driver written in 2000 by Tijs van Bakel and Rob Adamson, and it worked out of the box in Neutrino 6. Source patch and binary are available in the SF download page.

Next targets to test/port xmp include Plan9 (new port), BeOS and AIX (drivers exist, but never tested), and OS/2, IRIX, HP-UX and Solaris (used to work, but not tested for a long time). Contact me if you have access to one or more of those (or other) systems and have some free time to test the portability of an old mod player.

After some fun with “live” mod playing, Ademar asking me about mod playing and Paul Wise offering to maintain the project, I decided to do some work on the old xmp codebase and put it back into service. Recent changes include 64bit-safe code, an OSX driver, many Digitrakker MDL fixes and support for Atari ST/Falcon module formats. The changes were not announced, and it’s nice to see that someone already noticed!

My feeling is to rediscover an old toy long forgotten, and I’m very impressed with the fact that during the last week I could easily implement or fix things that were too hard or too boring to do many years ago. Also the code looks much uglier now. Do you have old Protracker mod files (or other obscure module formats) lying around? Give xmp a try and see if it builds/works correctly for you :)

A couple of months ago I bought a synth, and have spent some time trying to learn to play it. I can tell you: the whole process is much more efficient if you have fun and the right motivation — pick a music genre you like, something (preferably not too difficult) you’d like to hear yourself playing, and… play it. I chose old Amiga tracker music.

Protracker modules have a special place in my memories, from the countless hours debugging a player that was the first application I wrote for Linux and Unix. Recent work with Takashi Iwai, who I met back in the mod player days, prompted me to publish this story. Distant Call by Ronny Nordeide (a.k.a. Mr. Man/Andromeda) was one of my favorite four-channel mods back then, and now I found it’s also an easy and enjoyable piece to play — don’t be fooled, the somewhat uninspired and unrehearsed video above doesn’t make justice to its beautiful, evocative atmosphere.

The patch I used is a modified “Nice Piano” from Roland’s XV Collection, with a higher cutoff frequency for brightness, increased release to work around the lack of a sustain pedal and transposed down one octave. It is built around a bright, chorused JD-style piano sound similar to the one used on the original track (which is possibly from a JV-80). Not a flawless performance — any modplayer does better — but overall I’m satisfied with the result. What should I try to play next?