echolevel

Otherwise, they're little per-note phrase players like you'd expect. So you can write a custom arpeggio pattern that goes beyond what the normal triad tracker arp offers, but also jump sample slices/offsets, flip playback direction, retrigger etc.

You can map notes to specific tables, that's fun!

I like trackers so I put a tracker in my tracker. Sequence Tables run at microtiming resolution and can semi-randomise incoming notes against a scale rule that I pack into a 16bit number, as it has to be read in an insanely hot loop. Scale semitones are toggled via the cutest little piano.

Normally the app is minimised to the system tray, by the way. It optionally starts there when Windows boots and (again optionally) minimises there when the window is closed. It's never crashed yet and I've never had to close and open all ports mid-job like I did with the venerable MIDI-OX

Fader3, a compact, 3-fader USB MIDI controller with three long (120mm) throw faders which transmits 7 and 14-bit MIDI on customisable CC values and ports.

Use-case is really simple: I want three bits of hardware (a controller keyboard, my RME's MIDI input and my Fader3) to always be routed to a single loopMidi port which Reaper can treat as an input. Everything -> Reaper. Perfect. Btw you can make your own Fader3: github.com/echolevel/Fa...

I wrote GlueMidi to replace MIDI-OX (which was always crashing) as a merger/router. I use it all day, every day, and it's the thing I'm most proud of - mainly because of the tray icon that illuminates some DIN-5 pins to show incoming MIDI messages. Free here github.com/echolevel/Gl...

Game Subtitles — but my text is too long! TL;DR — a solution to take care of subtitle text so you don’t have to.

Game Subtitles - what to do if your text is just too long?

I've created a tool to make this easier - paginating and hyphenating where it needs to, in a variety of languages. In the vain hope that maybe I won't have to worry about it ever again!

You can find it here:
medium.com/@wildwinter/...

I implemented microtiming in Metron to allow stuff to occur at 192 PPQN (rather than the default 24). That means x microticks per subtick, and y subticks per row, where x is a microtick multiplier and y is tracker speed.

I already had a headache, so I'm glad I chose a relaxing way to test it.

The trick is to carefully curate what _can_ happen at those resolutions so as not to completely choke the CPU by letting buffer segmentation go hog wild. In this example, it's applying a semitone pitch offset to in-flight notes, which is mega cheap. Also sample slices, volume, pan, note delay, cut

I implemented microtiming in Metron to allow stuff to occur at 192 PPQN (rather than the default 24). That means x microticks per subtick, and y subticks per row, where x is a microtick multiplier and y is tracker speed.

I already had a headache, so I'm glad I chose a relaxing way to test it.

Importing a Metron Tracker song into #UE5 now gives an estimate of the song's memory footprint during playback in game - includes decoded PCM buffers, persistent DSP buffers, delay lines, etc.

This chiptune is roughly 92KB on disk, takes 0.9MB RAM and costs about 1% of audio CPU budget.

Don't worry, Metron also does large, non-silly tunes. I'm just not in the mood to write any.

If you're as old as me and you're thinking "actually those are quite big numbers for a chiptune", you're right: songs store 16bit PCM but decode to 32bit buffers in RAM, and a lot of that 92k songdata is settings structs for DSP, envelopes etc (which this song isn't even using).

It also gives me a good sense of whether I've gone too far in optimising my DSP for CPU (especially ARM, on the last project) by leaning towards precalced LUTs for wavetables etc. (more mem, and more mem churn, but less CPU) And...probably not?

The idea is that a composer can know while they work how big a song will be on disk, how big when cooked, how much CPU budget it eats and how much RAM it needs.

I was like "cute, but nobody cares about game music footprint these days right?" and then I looked at SSD/memory prices 😬

Importing a Metron Tracker song into #UE5 now gives an estimate of the song's memory footprint during playback in game - includes decoded PCM buffers, persistent DSP buffers, delay lines, etc.

This chiptune is roughly 92KB on disk, takes 0.9MB RAM and costs about 1% of audio CPU budget.

screen shot of a web app with different coloured shapes, representing sound sources, against a black screen

been reworking my Dane Law Max patches into JavaScript (and React) and ended up making this little synth / sequencer.

(Still v beta with lots of bugs to remove and features to add)

adamdparkinson.co.uk/orgonedonorp...

So - while I appreciate nobody (except me) cares about this in 2026 - you can absolutely soundtrack your entire game in under 10MB.

But that doesn't matter in these days of cheap, widely available RAM and storage, right?

Right?

And of course your tunes don't need samples at all - the 2nd and 3rd tunes in this video are just using my FM synth and my Karplus-Strong synth that are built into Metron, along with some randomiser effects that do rules-based scale offsets to keep things interesting.

it's stored as WAV in the Metron song file, then decoded to PCM on import to the Unreal asset and stays like that. As with everything in Metron, that gives composers and game devs huge flexibility and choice in whether/where they want to compromise for fidelity, performance, mem footprint, etc.

Sidestepping UE's entire SoundWave import/cook pipeline makes things massively easier, cool though that is; typically Metron songs use way less sampledata than fully rendered stems, so even complex/long songs can be loaded and played fast. And actually, Metron sampledata isn't compressed at all:

both for sync events (beats, rows, event per instrument NoteOn, custom events so that music can drive gameplay or narrative, etc) and for logging/stats, I've got some robust lock-free queues that let UE see wtf is going on and also communicate back to the Metron replayer. #demoscene as hell, ofcoz.

The idea is that it would be cool to give composers and musicians the 2.5MB tracker app so they can write tunes that a dev can just import into UE for playback, bidirectional sync hookup, etc. Rather than make them install 100GB of engine, project, content, etc.
Threadsafe sync is still a priority:

Also featuring Mark Angels, Ian Warriors and Dwight Scars

PaperZD just got a HUGE Update YouTube video by Cobra Code

PaperZD went open source and added some new features on the update.
Will soon start figuring out other features necessary for the 2d community, so let me know what do you think

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXrO...

#2d @unrealengine.bsky.social #ue5

I was not dyslexic, but a careless, scan-reading 10yo who just thought Heresy was this bloke Horus’ surname and a triumph for nominative determinism

jewelcase.app This reminded me to donate to the dev's ko-fi - thanks, mystery dev!

If it's any consolation, even when it *does* download it probably won't work. Apple's iPhone USB driver seems to be completely broken now. I've resorted to connecting Files to an SMB share with my mp3s, then using a great free app called Jewelcase as a player (no more Apple Music subscription nags)

“Without further adieu”

Which answer are you hoping for? If "yes", then sure: ALL films are animated (otherwise they're just enormous photo albums joined together in an eccentric and inconvenient browsing format). If "no", then sure: there's more footage of humans and backlots than of hand-drawn pictures. Break the game!