@john.boys Good catch, and that’s exactly the kind of thing I needed to hear before testing. One track at a time it is then, which makes the MIDI route a “lay down this track” tool rather than a whole-pattern one. That pushes the real weight onto writing the project files to the card, which is fine, that was always the more interesting half. Thanks for saving me a confusing debugging session.
are you ai bro?
line fx are pretty important to the sound of a tracker… midi will only get the pitch across. i think youll need to learn how to traxmaxx. which is mostly step writing on the unit yourself.
@john.boys Ha, fair. I write my own posts and create my own code, but I’ll admit I run them past a llm before hitting reply, because English isn’t my first language and I’d rather not sound like an idiot. Clearly overshot and landed on robot instead. Sorry!
You’re right about line fx. MIDI only gets the pitch across, which is why the file route is the one I care about. Fx live in the pattern file, so that’s where the work is. Last night I made both fx lanes editable, all 42 of them, with values shown in the same ranges the Tracker shows, so P reads -50 to +50 instead of 0 to 100.
And I’m not trying to replace step writing on the unit. That’s the part I actually enjoy. I just want to hand it something already half alive on the days the empty grid wins.
oh ok that explains it. well good luck with your traxxing!
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indeed its why i dont want to put down my tracker OG
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Hell, yes, that would be awesome. I’d gladly pay for that.
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@jameswooster Thanks, that means a lot. It writes real project folders straight to the card, so it’s a proper transfer tool and not just a toy. What would you most want it to do?
woop m8 is on ios now and can load in aum for per track treatments… maybe we need a tracker port to compete! i bought m8 ios and its 1:1 featurewise and looks the same. oh and the tone coming from all those sound sources is ACE! i still love the saturation in tracker tho! tracker is like training wheels, is great for chopped samples mostly. it really depends on how you integrate it with the rest of your gear or even if its your only piece, your actual workflow. but yeah. we need something for tracker given how far ahead other products are. but it already looks like a bloodbath
Well, I’m still a novice with the machine. Because I haven’t got to spend that much time with it as I have so many other devices. But when I do use it, it’s really great and I just love how it sounds and the whole thing just feels amazing. I’m making a huge move in a few weeks and I planned on starting to use the tracker all the time once I get to the other end. So I guess for me it’s hard to say what I’m wishing it would do. But I do love randomization on drum machines and synthesizer. So anything you can do to spice up the whole experience would be super cool because nothing’s better than a surprise. And it helps with the creativity as well.. Also ease of use is probably always the big wish with any thing in life.
@jameswooster Surprise is exactly what I’ve been building toward. Generate now rolls a new beat every press, and the percussion carries Chance so the Tracker keeps varying it on playback too. Good luck with the move.
@john.boys m8 on ios is wild, I get the appeal. But the Tracker has no companion software at all, and Polyend put the file formats out in the open themselves, so it felt like low hanging fruit. I’m not trying to compete with an m8, I just want mine to be less of an island.
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so is this underway?
Yeah, very much underway. I’m building and testing it right now, I’ll keep you posted.
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any chance youd make a windows version? or release the source on github so we could compile it ourselves?
No Windows version, sorry. It’s SwiftUI and CoreMIDI, so that would be a rewrite and not a port. The source is MIT and goes public once it’s out of beta though, and the engine that reads and writes the file formats is plain Swift with no Mac specific code in it, so that part is there to build on.
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Small update, since a few of you shaped this more than you probably think.
Two things I had wrong, both caught by the machine rather than by the docs. The length byte in a .mtp is the last step index, not the number of steps. Every file on my card uses 7, 31, 63 or 127. I was writing the count, so a 128 step pattern told the Tracker to read 129 steps out of a file holding 128, and everything came back scrambled.
@mat.on.the.moon, the other one is adjacent to your card observations: macOS drops ._ sidecar files next to everything it writes on a FAT card, and the Tracker reads those as patterns. Anyone moving files from a Mac by hand is doing this without seeing it.
@john.boys was right that live MIDI only reaches one track and that fx never come across, so that half is gone. It reads projects back now instead, which matters more than I expected: take a project off the card, work on it, write it back, and the instruments and mixer stay as they were.
It’s with Apple now. Source goes public as promised.
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It’s out. Patternaut is on the Mac App Store now:
https://apps.apple.com/app/id6792365053
A good part of it came from this thread, so thanks. If something doesn’t come out right on your card, tell me here and I’ll fix it.
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Oh, and it’s open source too, if you want to build it yourself or help with new features: GitHub - JarlLyng/patternaut: macOS companion for the Polyend Tracker+ and Tracker Mini. Generate and vary patterns, then read and write the device's own .mtp, .mt and .pti files on the SD card. SwiftUI, no accounts, no subscription. Open source, paid on the Mac App Store. · GitHub
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