The Hon. Mayor of Banjotown 🪕 @mayor@banjo.town

(Also, amateur #mastoadmin protip: if you get the 'something went wrong' screen immediately after starting masto's services, wait a minute or two; seems to take a bit of time to start responding to requests.)

banjo.town was offline for ~14-15 hours, power went out briefly and I guess I need to revisit the server config so Mastodon comes back online automagically #mastoadmin

@ElfLord Going to convert my bitcoin into flooz and make a killing

spouse is out of the house, practice earworm at full volume #mastomusic #banjo

@Pixley My inner monologue for anything requiring a skill progression is always "Just show me all those fancy moves so I can start trashing bozos!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8VD4JXUozM (CW: orientalism that perhaps hasn't aged well but isn't the butt of the joke)

@Pixley One of my wife's favorite "haha I'm kidding, but not entirely" sayings is "I hate learning"

...although TBH, GoatTracker looks as masochistic as SID Wizard in many ways.

I'm eyeing the SID Tracker 64 ipad app pretty hard; for me it's always a matter of choosing my roadblocks, and time spent fighting with an unfamiliar UI and process is time not spent actually making goofy tunes; if I learn the ropes in a friendlier app, *then* I can go hardcore mode.

I am coming around to the position that it is a bit pointlessly masochistic to use SID Wizard in an emulator; being able to track music on an actual C64 would be one thing, but between managing virtual drives and having to remember keymappings (VICE to C64) I'm hitting my patience threshold pretty quickly.

Tried to download GoatTracker only to realize the latest OS X binary is from 2015, and of course won't run on Catalina. Now downloading Xtools to see if I can build it myself.

I can tell using SID Wizard efficiently will require memorizing emacs-level keyboard shortcuts, but this isn't bad for a half hour of tinkering (time spent looking up shortcuts not included) #chiptunes #commodore64

I'm not sure what the tracker of choice was in the 1980s, but SID Wizard is pretty amazing at first glance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoijGJEDfdA

I would download lots of SID files from Q-Link back in the day; I had a playback app and it was always interesting to listen to the arrangements people came up with, but I never really had an inkling of exactly how they were put together.

@Louisa you've got to ease into things

Choosing battles: *if* I am going to attempt the RPM challenge with chiptunes, I'm going to use SID Wizard or similar; I'm interested in the programming angle but as a *project*, there's no way I'm going to get up to speed in time for February.

This is a really good overview of the Commodore 64 SID ship if you've got a layman's understanding of how synthesizers work: https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue41/Working_With_SID.php

@scruss yeah, it seems a little willfully fussy for old time's sake, but it won't be hard to write a bash script to run text -> PRG -> vice as a single command

...and after all that I realized that of course the binary install for OS X includes petcat, and is naturally snappier to run natively than over X11 (and I won't have to screw around with trying to stream pulseaudio from the Pi to my mac, since the pi runs headless and nowhere near a convenient audio hookup.) the CLI binaries are all under the /bin directory on the mac disk image.

I got Vice compiled eventually, and immediately ran into a libGL problem with XQuartz (ymmv in other X environments) but this seems to have been fixed thusly:

https://github.com/ControlSystemStudio/cs-studio/issues/1828#issuecomment-256115637