m8c
Introduction
The Dirtywave M8 Tracker is a portable sequencer and synthesizer, featuring 8 tracks of assignable instruments such as FM, waveform synthesis, virtual analog, sample playback, and MIDI output. It is powered by a Teensy micro-controller and inspired by the Gameboy tracker Little Sound DJ.
While Dirtywave makes new batches of units available on a regular basis, M8 is sometimes sold out due to the worldwide chip shortage and high demand of the unit. To fill this gap and and to allow users to freely test this wonderful tracker, Timothy Lamb was kind enough to make the M8 Headless available to everyone.
If you like the M8 and you gel with the tracker workflow, please support Dirtywave by purchasing the actual unit. You can check its availability here. Meanwhile, you can also subscribe to Timothy Lamb's Patreon.
m8c is a client for Dirtywave M8 tracker's headless mode. The application should be cross-platform ready and can be built in Linux, Windows (with MSYS2/MINGW64) and Mac OS.
Many thanks to:
- Trash80 for the great M8 hardware and the original font (stealth57.ttf) that was converted to a bitmap for use in the progam.
- driedfruit for a wonderful little routine to blit inline bitmap fonts, https://github.com/driedfruit/SDL_inprint/
- marcinbor85 for the slip handling routine, https://github.com/marcinbor85/slip
- turbolent for the great Golang-based g0m8 application, which I used as reference on how the M8 serial protocol works.
- Everyone who's contributed to m8c!
Disclaimer: I'm not a coder and hardly understand C, use at your own risk :)
Installation
Windows / MacOS
There are prebuilt binaries available in the releases section for Windows and recent versions of MacOS.
Linux / MacOS (building from source)
These instructions are tested with Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and Raspberry Pi OS with desktop (March 4 2021 release), but should apply for other Debian/Ubuntu flavors as well. The begining on the build process on OSX is slightly different at the start, and then the same once packages are installed.
The instructions assume that you already have a working Linux desktop installation with an internet connection.
Open Terminal and run the following commands:
Install required packages (Raspberry Pi, Linux)
sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y git gcc make libsdl2-dev libserialport-dev
Install required packages (OSX)
This assumes you have installed brew
brew update && brew install git gcc make sdl2 libserialport pkg-config
Download source code (All)
mkdir code && cd code
git clone https://github.com/laamaa/m8c.git
Build the program
cd m8c
make
Start the program
Connect the M8 or Teensy (with headless firmware) to your computer and start the program. It should automatically detect your device.
./m8c
If the stars are aligned correctly, you should see the M8 screen.
Keyboard mappings
Keys for controlling the progam:
- Up arrow = up
- Down arrow = down
- Left arrow = left
- Right arrow = right
- z / left shift = shift
- x / space = play
- a / left alt = opt
- s / left ctrl = edit
Additional controls:
- Alt + enter = toggle full screen / windowed
- Alt + F4 = quit program
- Delete = opt+edit (deletes a row)
- Esc = toggle keyjazz on/off
- r / select+start+opt+edit = reset display (if glitches appear on the screen, use this)
Keyjazz
Keyjazz allows to enter notes with keyboard, oldschool tracker-style. The layout is two octaves, starting from keys Z and Q. When keyjazz is active, regular a/s/z/x keys are disabled. The base octave can be adjusted with numpad star/divide keys and the velocity can be set
- Numpad asterisk (*): increase base octave
- Numpad divide (/): decrease base ooctave
- Numpad plus (+): increase velocity
- Numpad minus (-): decrease velocity
Gamepads
The program uses SDL's game controller system, which should make it work automagically with most gamepads. On startup, the program tries to load a SDL game controller database named gamecontrollerdb.txt from the same directory as the config file. If your joypad doesn't work out of the box, you might need to create custom bindings to this file, for example with SDL2 Gamepad Tool.
Audio
Experimental audio routing support can be enabled by setting the config value "audio_enabled" to "true". The audio buffer size can also be tweaked from the config file for possible lower latencies.
If the right audio device is not picked up by default, you can use a specific audio device by using "audio_output_device" config parameter.
Config
Application settings and keyboard/game controller bindings can be configured via config.ini.
If not found, the file will be created in one of these locations:
- Windows:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\m8c\config.ini - Linux:
/home/<username>/.local/share/m8c/config.ini - MacOS:
/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/m8c/config.ini
See the config.ini.sample file to see the available options.
Enjoy making some nice music!
FAQ
- When starting the program, something like the following appears and the program does not start:
$ ./m8c
INFO: Looking for USB serial devices.
INFO: Found M8 in /dev/ttyACM1.
INFO: Opening port.
ERROR: Error: Failed: Permission denied
This is likely caused because the user running m8c does not have permission to use the serial port. The eaiest way to fix this is to add the current user to a group with permission to use the serial port.
On Linux systems, look at the permissions on the serial port shown on the line that says "Found M8 in":
$ ls -la /dev/ttyACM1
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 166, 0 Jan 8 14:51 /dev/ttyACM0
This shows that the serial port is owned by the user 'root' and the group 'dialout'. Both the user and the group have read/write permissions. To add a user to the group, run this command, replacing 'dialout' with the group shown on your own system:
sudo adduser $USER dialout
You may need to log out and back in or even fully reboot the system for this change to take effect, but this will hopefully fix the problem. Please see this issue for more details.
Bonus content: quickly install m8c locally with nix
nix-env -iA m8c-stable -f https://github.com/laamaa/m8c/archive/refs/heads/main.tar.gz