I might be mistaken, but it looks like clicking the notes on the left doesn't play the note as a preview? Would that be able to be implemented in the future? I usually prefer that over placing a note to see how it sounds. Thank you for keep this updated!!
Yeah, I didn’t know about that feature in the original (or perhaps I had forgotten about it). But kind folks at Bosca’s subreddit reminded me about it, and I’ve already implemented it for beta 2 which should be out some time next week!
Are there plans for adding undo/redo and simple shortcuts anytime soon? It'd definitely make this worth using for me. Other than that this is a great project!
Yes, I will work on undo/redo soon! But what shortcuts are missing? There are plenty of them, at least for things which don’t need to be mouse-driven :) Or do you mean you want to reassign them? For that I don’t have any specific plans at this time.
That's great :D There aren't many I'm thinking of, mainly ctrl+shift+s for save as A few combos to edit the arrangement, like alt+click to place a section rather than dragging it. Not many off the top of my head though.
This is a great tool with huge potential I guess, tutorial is great. I bet it would make it more awesome as it is now by adding also some known music tutorials (not entire tune but a few seconds, split by instruments/channels, explaining how to do each instrument and how to put them together to create the final song.)
For instance Mercury (J. Murphy, Sunshine), Old souls/Time (H. Zimmer, Inception) or maybe some easier musics. Inspiration could also comes from the 80s games like on Amstrad CPC which brings us great chip tunes.
I'm no musician by far (always hate the few lessons I've got in school :P) but still as pretty much everyone, I like music, even creating some in my head, but I would like to learn also how to give them some life with your tool.
I would be ill-equipped to give anyone music lessons :) Besides, with Bosca you cannot create just about any kind of music. Bosca Ceoil is a step sequencer, your music will have a distinct rhythm to it, which you cannot escape. Orchestral music that you reference, from Sunshine and Inception, is simply impossible here. You’d need a much more powerful DAW to have that level of control over the melody and composition.
Bosca fits a particular niche. When getting to know it, I think it’s better to approach Bosca not from the perspective of “I want to realize some very specific idea from my head” but rather as a box full of classic LEGOs. Akin to a step sequencer, you are working on a grid with LEGOs, yet you can create some impressively complex structures after gaining some experience. You need to learn the limitations and what the tool can achieve, which will shape your ideas for what you can make with it.
It’s not a limitless tool (as if anything is, right?), but it’s also not overwhelming. You have few simple rules which you have to follow, but that can be good for creativity in certain ways. Once you learn what this tool can do, you can be efficient at solving particular problems with it and getting the result in the niche that this tool excels at.
This is awesome! I've played with Beepbox and am using 1BitDragon right now, I love these music editors that work with my smooth brain. Great work giving this software new life!!!
Is there by any chance a plan to add pitch bending or bridging between notes like Beepbox?
I don’t have any specific plans for extending its musical capabilities, but this particular feature has been requested elsewhere. My current concern is how to expose pitch bending without losing the simplicity of the app. Like, there are many things which can be done on the technical level, but can also detract from the experience that Bosca aims to provide, y’know?
I’ll look into how Beepbox does it, maybe that’ll give me some inspirations!
I totally understand, it needs to stay simple or else it will become enough like the DAW's that have such a steep learning curve that it becomes a major barrier for entry. It would lose something that makes it really special.
That being said, Beepbox does it pretty simply, it itself being an app that's intuitive and simple to use. Iirc, you simply hold the button that places a note and drag it to another note to bridge it.
**Edit, I actually just checked it out, you hold alt, then drag the note to bridge.
this got me thinking how cute it would be if godot got its own built in music editor like pico8... i wonder how much work it would be to port the format from this program to work with godot's sound and music functionality
What you need is a synthesizer. Godot has support for generated audio streams, but how it is generated is up to users to implement. This is what Bosca uses. It has a custom software synthesizer and it produces data for the Godot’s audio stream to play back.
You can totally make an editor plugin similar in functionality to Bosca Ceoil. You can probably even adapt the app itself into a plugin relatively easily. The app is just a bunch of fancy UI on top of the synthesizer, but you can make whatever you want with the synthesizer. It’s also open source and free to use :)
This creates a very strong argument for not having a music editor as built-in functionality.
ah yeah, you know, in retrospect that makes a lot of sense, it's probably better if fans and devs can make their own stand alone synths rather than pre-boxing one in with the program itself, in pico8 it works because everything is supposed to be self contained, but not everyone will want to use the bosca synthesizer in their godot project, so it would just be extra bloat to the engine for people who want to make their own
i love what you're doing here! however in linux i start off having a good experience until the music starts to get crunchy and my whole pc slows down to a near hault, and this is with only one pattern and no other programs running, thankyou for devoting time to this project btw:)
Hey again! I’ve got myself a Pop OS install on an old laptop, and after playing around for a bit I couldn’t reproduce any problem like you describe.
Would you mind giving me a bit more details? Namely, what’s your operating system and hardware spec? Were you doing anything specific in the moment it started to get crunchy? Any particular instrument, effect, filter and volume setting? Can you reproduce the issue or was it a one-time thing? Does it happen with different patterns after some time or is there anything that they have in common?
Details like that will give me a better starting point to keep looking, and maybe other users would then be able to confirm. If you have a GitHub account, I’d appreciate this info to be provided as a report there:
https://github.com/YuriSizov/boscaceoil-blue/issues
This helps keeping track of every issue in one place. But also don’t feel like you have to do all this work. I’ll be testing it on Linux more now, and may end up repeating your experience at some point with my tools at the ready.
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I might be mistaken, but it looks like clicking the notes on the left doesn't play the note as a preview? Would that be able to be implemented in the future? I usually prefer that over placing a note to see how it sounds. Thank you for keep this updated!!
Yeah, I didn’t know about that feature in the original (or perhaps I had forgotten about it). But kind folks at Bosca’s subreddit reminded me about it, and I’ve already implemented it for beta 2 which should be out some time next week!
Are there plans for adding undo/redo and simple shortcuts anytime soon? It'd definitely make this worth using for me. Other than that this is a great project!
Yes, I will work on undo/redo soon! But what shortcuts are missing? There are plenty of them, at least for things which don’t need to be mouse-driven :) Or do you mean you want to reassign them? For that I don’t have any specific plans at this time.
That's great :D
There aren't many I'm thinking of, mainly ctrl+shift+s for save as
A few combos to edit the arrangement, like alt+click to place a section rather than dragging it. Not many off the top of my head though.
“Save as” is bound to Ctrl+Alt+S right now. You can find all of the shortcuts in the Help section (make sure to check all tabs in there!) :)
This is a great tool with huge potential I guess, tutorial is great.
I bet it would make it more awesome as it is now by adding also some known music tutorials (not entire tune but a few seconds, split by instruments/channels, explaining how to do each instrument and how to put them together to create the final song.)
For instance Mercury (J. Murphy, Sunshine), Old souls/Time (H. Zimmer, Inception) or maybe some easier musics. Inspiration could also comes from the 80s games like on Amstrad CPC which brings us great chip tunes.
I'm no musician by far (always hate the few lessons I've got in school :P) but still as pretty much everyone, I like music, even creating some in my head, but I would like to learn also how to give them some life with your tool.
Thanks for your work.
Hey there, and thank you!
I would be ill-equipped to give anyone music lessons :) Besides, with Bosca you cannot create just about any kind of music. Bosca Ceoil is a step sequencer, your music will have a distinct rhythm to it, which you cannot escape. Orchestral music that you reference, from Sunshine and Inception, is simply impossible here. You’d need a much more powerful DAW to have that level of control over the melody and composition.
Bosca fits a particular niche. When getting to know it, I think it’s better to approach Bosca not from the perspective of “I want to realize some very specific idea from my head” but rather as a box full of classic LEGOs. Akin to a step sequencer, you are working on a grid with LEGOs, yet you can create some impressively complex structures after gaining some experience. You need to learn the limitations and what the tool can achieve, which will shape your ideas for what you can make with it.
It’s not a limitless tool (as if anything is, right?), but it’s also not overwhelming. You have few simple rules which you have to follow, but that can be good for creativity in certain ways. Once you learn what this tool can do, you can be efficient at solving particular problems with it and getting the result in the niche that this tool excels at.
Cheers!
This is awesome! I've played with Beepbox and am using 1BitDragon right now, I love these music editors that work with my smooth brain. Great work giving this software new life!!!
Is there by any chance a plan to add pitch bending or bridging between notes like Beepbox?
Hey, thanks!
I don’t have any specific plans for extending its musical capabilities, but this particular feature has been requested elsewhere. My current concern is how to expose pitch bending without losing the simplicity of the app. Like, there are many things which can be done on the technical level, but can also detract from the experience that Bosca aims to provide, y’know?
I’ll look into how Beepbox does it, maybe that’ll give me some inspirations!
I totally understand, it needs to stay simple or else it will become enough like the DAW's that have such a steep learning curve that it becomes a major barrier for entry. It would lose something that makes it really special.
That being said, Beepbox does it pretty simply, it itself being an app that's intuitive and simple to use. Iirc, you simply hold the button that places a note and drag it to another note to bridge it.
**Edit, I actually just checked it out, you hold alt, then drag the note to bridge.
this got me thinking how cute it would be if godot got its own built in music editor like pico8... i wonder how much work it would be to port the format from this program to work with godot's sound and music functionality
Don't threaten me with a good time!
What you need is a synthesizer. Godot has support for generated audio streams, but how it is generated is up to users to implement. This is what Bosca uses. It has a custom software synthesizer and it produces data for the Godot’s audio stream to play back.
You can totally make an editor plugin similar in functionality to Bosca Ceoil. You can probably even adapt the app itself into a plugin relatively easily. The app is just a bunch of fancy UI on top of the synthesizer, but you can make whatever you want with the synthesizer. It’s also open source and free to use :)
This creates a very strong argument for not having a music editor as built-in functionality.
ah yeah, you know, in retrospect that makes a lot of sense, it's probably better if fans and devs can make their own stand alone synths rather than pre-boxing one in with the program itself, in pico8 it works because everything is supposed to be self contained, but not everyone will want to use the bosca synthesizer in their godot project, so it would just be extra bloat to the engine for people who want to make their own
Thank you for porting Bosca Ceoil to Godot!
You got featured on Games From Scratch!
Yeah, I quite noticed :) Thanks, Mike!
yeeeaaaah!!! :D
i love what you're doing here! however in linux i start off having a good experience until the music starts to get crunchy and my whole pc slows down to a near hault, and this is with only one pattern and no other programs running, thankyou for devoting time to this project btw:)
Oh, that’s unfortunate. Sounds like a problem with the synthesizer. I don’t have a Linux system, but I’ll try to investigate. Thanks for the report!
Hey again! I’ve got myself a Pop OS install on an old laptop, and after playing around for a bit I couldn’t reproduce any problem like you describe.
Would you mind giving me a bit more details? Namely, what’s your operating system and hardware spec? Were you doing anything specific in the moment it started to get crunchy? Any particular instrument, effect, filter and volume setting? Can you reproduce the issue or was it a one-time thing? Does it happen with different patterns after some time or is there anything that they have in common?
Details like that will give me a better starting point to keep looking, and maybe other users would then be able to confirm. If you have a GitHub account, I’d appreciate this info to be provided as a report there: https://github.com/YuriSizov/boscaceoil-blue/issues
This helps keeping track of every issue in one place. But also don’t feel like you have to do all this work. I’ll be testing it on Linux more now, and may end up repeating your experience at some point with my tools at the ready.
Thanks in advance, whatever you decide!