Programmable music box for the Playdate game console.

About Organette


Motivation

I bought the Playdate mostly for the purpose of writing fun programs to run on it. It has a really nice crank, which immediately made me think of a music box. I checked out some other existing music box programs people had already made for the Playdate, but they were all pretty limited in things like song length and range of notes. So I decided to make my own.

My goals for the jam were:

  • Playback of songs using the crank.
  • Ability to create/edit songs, adding and removing notes

Usage

You can download my final jam build here.

This project was featured on the Wheel Reinvention Jam Recap Stream. My demo video for that describes how to use the editor.

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This project was featured on the jam recap stream. Here's the final demo video I made for that stream. It goes into more detail about how the editor works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXNbxvz-aAE

I'm happy to say I accomplished my main goal for the jam: to implement a song editor with enough functionality to make songs on the Playdate itself (previously I had been writing them out note by note in code). There's a demo of the editor here: https://handmade.network/snippet/2520 I uploaded the final build here: https://handmade.network/snippet/2519

As my final jam update, here's a song I just made with the editor over about 45 minutes (yes I got a hand cramp!). &organette

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My main goal for the jam was to implement an editor sufficient to make compositions on the playdate itself. Here's a simple demo of the editor in action: https://vimeo.com/870213926

I'm uploading my final build for the Wheel Reinvention Jam here. It's a zipped .pdx file, which can be sideloaded on a physical Playdate or opened with the free Simulator included in the sdk (I used SDK version 2.0.3).

I'll post a demo of it soon!

I was feeling low energy this evening, so I just let myself do some easy and satisfying tasks rather than pushing on the edit UI. I got the tracks properly sorted by pitch, fixed the audio clipping on chords, added support for multiple songs and a menu to switch between them, and hand-transcribed another song for fun. The fixed audio clipping really makes it much more pleasant to interact with. &organette

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This is now producing sounds similar to music I like! My goal for the jam is to be able to edit and compose a song like this on the device itself, rather than in code.

I also automated the process of uploading and running the build on the device, so I'm now able to iterate pretty quickly. Need to figure out how to keep big chords from blowing out the speaker. &organette

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After 90 minutes of mostly SDK wrangling, &organette can play a (very) small subset of all possible songs.

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