It sometimes takes many months or even more than a year for me to add new features, but thanks to AI coding I have been able to speed things up with new versions of VividTracker the past months. I was resisting at first, because vibe coding makes you soon feel you loose touch with the code, but at the end it is the end result that matters. I'm trying to find some middle ground here. VividShaper is a little bit behind, but that is because the update is quite big.

I will go through some of the changes I made and what I aim to do soon.

Version 2.18

Maybe the craziest (but also very useful) feature is that VividTracker now also works as a C64 Ultimate companion app. If you own a C64 Ultimate, you can now send files from VividTracker to the C64U.

It all started with the idea that since the C64U can receive and play MOD-files through the network, I thought it would be a cool little feature to be able to send the mod files from VividTracker. This feature was released in v2.18.

Version 2.19

But then, I realised that it would be very nice if VividTracker could send all sorts of files to the C64U, so I turned it into a companion app for the C64U. This means you can upload and run not just mod-files but also sid-files, crt-files, prg-files. You can also upload and mount disk images (d64, g64, d71, d81). It has also a built in FTP-client allowing you to connect and browse the C64U from the file browser. You can watch how this is done here:

The C64U companion feature was not all that was added with that release. Mounting folders was another new feature, which allows you to mount any folder outside of VividTracker, such as your iPhone's Download folder, so that you can easily browse the Download folder for any mod-file you just downloaded in Safari.

Version 2.20

Version 2.20 was another big release, adding support to both Ableton Link and Link Audio. Link Audio means you can stream audio from one app to another that supports Link Audio, for instance from VividTracker to Ableton Live for further post-processing or just integrate the two for a great live show! Version 2.21 was just a bug fix, fixing glitches in the audio that was caused by Ableton Link integration.

Version 2.22

One of the coolest apps released this year is probably Staccato (https://staccato.ai), which allows you to write with a chatbot ideas on music and it will create small MIDI-patterns that you can drag&drop to other apps. I thought it would be very cool if it was possible to import MIDI-files to VividTracker as well. It will of course be very limiting, due to the limitations of the mod-format itself, but I managed to add midi-import to VividTracker in this version.

This means you can now load a midi-pattern from the file browser. It will load the pattern into the track where you have the cursor. It only supports monophonic patterns, so if you try to load a polyphonic pattern it will take the notes with the highest pitch. If you load a drum pattern (i.e. channel 10 midi file), it will trigger the different notes as different samples on note C-3. For instance, MIDI note 36 (which is C2) will trigger sample 1 on note C-3 (corresponds to Bass Drum 1) and MIDI note 42 (which is F#2) will trigger sample 7 on note C-3 (corresponds to Closed Hi-Hat). If you load a polyphonic drum track, it will choose the note with the highest velocity first.

If you are running VividTracker as an iPad app on a Mac, you can even drag&drop the midi-files onto the different tracks. Say you have a midi-file with a drum track and you want to add it to track 3. Then you can just drag it over to track 3 in the VividTracker window.

Besides MIDI-import, I also added two new features in the sample editor: A sample reverb feature and a mirror sample feature. The reverb feature is quite simple in that you can't change any parameters (there's no room for it, haha!), but quite effective anyway to give your samples a more ambient sound. I tried to choose the parameters that would be most useful and you can always press it twice if you want to get even more reverb. The mirror feature is very simple. It will reverse the sample and play it backwards. Playing with both features is really fun, first mirroring and then “reverbing” a sample.

Version 2.23

One thing that I thought about adding to VividTracker for a long time is the ability to record things directly to it using the built in microphone or connecting it to Audiobus as a destination app for audio. This feature is finally here with this version! Other ways of importing samples, like AudioCopy or opening a wav-file from another app to VividTracker, are of course very useful too, but I think this will be my favourite way of importing sound. Especially using Audiobus, where you can set e.g. VividShaper as source and VividTracker as destination (or any other AUv3 plugin).

I got a request that it should be possible to scroll beyond row 63 so that you end up at the top of the pattern again, so I added that it (and vice versa if you are at the top and scroll up). But then I thought it would also be nice to have shadowed rows where you get to see the previous pattern and the next pattern in the song, so I added that too. Scrolling beyond the pattern will only wrap within the same pattern though. I thought that it would be nice if it would jump to the next pattern in the song instead, but I will probably add that in as a toggle so you can choose the behaviour you want. Most users I've talked to this far wants it to wrap within the same pattern.

Future updates

I really wanted a tracker that could also play and edit both s3m and xm files, but these are quite complicated formats, especially from an UI point of view. In Protracker, you only need to work with hexadecimals for effects (0-F) but these formats go beyond these numbers. This means I would need to change the keyboard at the bottom of the screen somehow, and I don't know yet how that should be done. Then there are other things as well. In Fasttracker 2, you have instruments that can be a set of samples with their own envelopes. That requires a different sampling editor.

But now, with the help of AI coding, maybe I will get this done! It would be very nice for sure.

The last update of VividShaper was from September last year (v1.4), where I added in new features such as portamento, legato, and a new effects routing system with delays and reverbs that could be connected with each other. Since then, I been working on a big update, which is why you haven't seen any new releases of VividShaper for a while. This update is REALLY BIG, but I decided to split it up into smaller releases anyway. Otherwise, I will never get it done. Each of them will still be a pretty big jump in new features. So here is a roadmap for the next versions to come:

Version 1.5

This version is just about done and includes:

• A totally new browsing system for patches. Instead of using a drop down menu, we now get two tables in a patch view. The first table is for categories and the other table is for patches within the chosen category. Categories are, as before, based on the hash-tags that you use to categories each patch. Within this patch view, you can also preview patches. Just select a new patch and you will be able to play it, but you need to press the load button if you want to replace the old patch with the new one.
• A new coding editor, with syntax highlighting.
• Better sound. In the current version, especially at higher notes, you get some noise caused by aliasing. The aliasing filter I used worked in part, but the one that comes with this version is much better.
• A new filter. The current filter functions only filter the actual wave forms. This is very useful of course, because it means you can filter a wave form and the continue to modify the filtered version of that wave form, but the resonance effect doesn't work in the same way as a filter that you add to the audio output because it doesn't remember anything. The new biquad filter is added onto each oscillator at the output as a post-effect, giving you sharper harmonics and a resonance that can “scream” a little bit better. The old filters will still be available, so it means you can combine both if you like (although I don't know how useful that would be).

This is how the new patch view looks like:

This is how the new editor looks like: