Fun with random music generation

I recently ran across Autotracker by Ben "GreaseMonkey" Russell, which was designed as a sort of sfxr/bfxr analog for generating random music for ludumdare 48-hour games.

Unfortunately, it isn't as convenient as bfxr. Instead of a pretty browser interface, you have to know how to run a python script. ( https://github.com/wibblymat/ld24/blob/master/autotracker.py )

So I took it upon myself to make a little script that wraps Autotracker and creates a zip file of 50 random songs.

I wrapped that script in a nightly cron job, and put the results here. Every day there will be a new set of 50 random songs, all in .it format which is importable into OHRRPGCE games.

http://gilgamesh.hamsterrepublic.com/autotracker/fifty-random-autotracker-songs-updated-daily.zip

The songs are all from the same videogamey-chiptune 8-bit genre, and most of them are pretty terrible ("heinous musical crime" quipped one satisfied user) but just like mashing the "Randomize" button in bfxr, sometimes you just happen upon exactly what you were looking for :)

I finally checked this out, and I must say, I'm pretty impressed so far. Sure, there are many that seem a little out there, but I've found a few that I like just from today's offerings. Pretty cool man!

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Cornbread Chemist

Yes, it took me a while, but I had a listen a couple days ago. I'm quite impressed, actually. All of them are better than I could do! However while the melodies are distinct, they do end up sounding pretty similar, because the instruments don't change much.

Listening with headphones, I found that there's a rather painful split between the left and right ears. So I wanted to play around with the stereo and panning options when I have time.