tracker

Motif Tracker is the game's tune editor, embedded in the game for now (a standalone release comes later): a FastTracker II-style tracker over motif's .cts tune file and its live player. (The extension is a leftover from an earlier name; it is changing to .mts, Motif Tracker Source, in a later release.) Eight channels, XM's four columns per cell (note, instrument, volume, effect), an order list of patterns, the starter instrument bank, a reverb bus and a mix-bus compressor in the file, and everything you change is heard at the next tick while the tune plays.

The tune file format is motif's; motif tune check FILE.cts validates one, motif tune render renders it to WAV, and motif mcp lets an agent edit the same file. The soundtrack's twenty tunes ship in assets/tunes/ (the game plays them live: docs/soundtrack.md): spy, groove, breaker, black-glass, black-glass-title, basement-circuit, blind-spot, breach-vector, clock-edge, closed-loop, cold-boot, dead-sector, dirty-cache, fault-line, glass-current, obsidian-index, quiet-array, relay-ghost, sector-drift and shadow-protocol, with demo-columns, which touches every column, every effect and every instrument.

Running it

The tracker ships inside the game today; a standalone build is planned. Native (the desktop build):

crash-the-stack --tune assets/tunes/spy.cts    a tune
crash-the-stack --tracker                      a blank tune

Ctrl-S saves to $XDG_DATA_HOME/crash-the-stack/tunes/NAME.cts (the shipped tunes are read-only; a save of one lands there under the same name), Ctrl-O opens the next tune (shipped, then saved), Ctrl-N starts a blank one, Ctrl-E prints the tune's text to stdout, Escape with nothing playing leaves.

Web: /tracker/ is the door, its own page and wasm beside the game's (the game's page carries no tracker code, and the game's menu no link: the site's nav is where the tracker is found).

/tracker/                 a blank tune
/tracker/?tune=spy        a bundled tune (any of assets/tunes/: spy, blind-spot, demo-columns, ...)
/tracker/#t=...           a shared tune (see Sharing)

Ctrl-O cycles the bundled tunes; Ctrl-S and Ctrl-E both make the share URL (there is no file to save to on the web).

The screen

The header's first line: MOTIF TRACKER, the tune's name, 096BPM the tempo, SPD06 the speed (ticks per row), 4/4 4 ROWS/BEAT the meter (the time signature, then the rows a beat gets), ORD00/17 the order position and the order's length, PAT00 the pattern at that position, OCT4 the octave the piano keys play, INS01 BASS the instrument a new note gets. The right end says EDIT while edit mode is on, PLAY while the tune plays, or a message (SAVED, OUT OF RANGE, ...).

The second line is the order list: every position's pattern number, the cursor's position in brackets, the playing one lit. Under each channel a 2 px level meter on a dB scale (-40 dB at the left edge, 0 dBFS full width); a muted channel's strip is solid red, a soloed channel's is lit.

Then the spectrum strip: 32 bars from 20 Hz at the left to 16 kHz at the right, log-spaced, each band's level in dB against full scale (-60 dB at the bottom), with a peak-hold tick that falls over about a second. It is the mix as mixed, before the limiter. Alt-S hides and shows it.

Then the grid: hex row numbers, the cursor row in the middle, one cell per channel as C-4 01 40 A0F (note, instrument, volume, effect). Beat rows are tinted, bar rows more so, by the meter.

Edit mode, the octave and the instrument

Space toggles edit mode. With it off, note keys audition the current instrument (INS) without writing; with it on, a note key writes the note with INS at the cursor and steps one row down.

The octave (OCT) is set with F1..F8, natively and on the web. The two piano rows span two octaves: Z S X D C V G B H N J M play OCT (Z is C), Q 2 W 3 E R 5 T 6 Y 7 U play OCT+1, and I 9 O 0 P plus , L . ; / reach into OCT+2. ` ` (or 1) writes a note off, shown as ===`.

The instrument (INS) is set with Ctrl-Up / Ctrl-Down; it is the instrument every new note gets and the one the instrument panel edits. On the instrument and volume columns the digits 0-9 type the two decimal digits as shown (instrument 01..99, volume 00..64); on the effect column 0-9 A-F type the three hex digits of an XM effect (A0F, C20, ...).

Keys

The web page owns the keyboard while the tracker is up: every key in this table is kept from the browser (Tab no longer moves its focus, Space no longer scrolls), the canvas takes focus on load and on any click, and only the browser's reserved chords pass (Ctrl-W/T/Q/L, Ctrl-Shift-I/J/C, F5, F11, F12). The page forwards the chords itself (the browser's own Ctrl-S, Ctrl-O, Ctrl-N and Alt-digit bindings are prevented while the tracker is up).

Follow

While the tune plays with edit mode off, the view follows the playing order position and row. With edit mode on it stays where you are, so you can write ahead of the playhead.

The panels

Ctrl-I opens the instrument panel for INS: the kind on the first line, then every parameter of that kind with the instrument's own values over the kind's defaults. Up / Down select a line; Right / Left step it (an integer by 1, a decimal by 0.05; with Shift, ten times that); on the kind line they cycle the bank. Typing digits, - and . then Enter sets a value outright; Backspace edits it; Escape drops it. Every change plays live, so hold a note (or let the tune run) while you turn a knob. Ctrl-I again closes the panel.

Ctrl-B opens the bus page instead: first the meter's three lines (BEATS per bar 1..16, DENOM the beat's note value 1/2/4/8/16/32, ROWS/BEAT 1..16: type any values for an odd meter), then the reverb (REVERB zitarev or revsc, SIZE, DAMP, MIX) and the mix-bus compressor (COMP on or off, THRESHOLD dBFS, RATIO, ATTACK and RELEASE in ms, MAKEUP dB). The same keys as the instrument panel; a value the file format refuses (out of range) is dropped with OUT OF RANGE. The compressor is on by default at -12 dB, 4:1, 5/80 ms, +2 dB, which is what every tune played through before it was a setting; COMP off is a 1:1 ratio with no makeup.

Ctrl-I from the bus page switches to the instrument panel and back.

The meter

The header shows the meter as a time signature and a resolution: 3/4 4 ROWS/BEAT is three quarter-note beats to the bar, four rows to each beat. The grid tints every beat row and, more, every bar row: at 3/4 with 4 rows a beat, beats on rows 0, 4, 8 and bars on 0, 12, 24. A new pattern is one bar of beats times four (64 rows at 4/4, 48 at 3/4, 48 at 6/8 with 2 rows a beat). Ticks and effects do not read the meter: SPD is still ticks per row and BPM is XM's (a tick is 2.5/BPM seconds, so 4 rows at speed 6 are one beat of 24 ticks); the meter only says how the rows group, and the denominator is a label. In the file it is meter: (4 3) (rows per beat, beats per bar) after channels:, with a third number for the denominator when it is not 4 ((2 6 8) is 6/8); 4/4 is not written.

Sharing

Ctrl-E prints the tune's text natively (crash: tune-share and the text, for the clipboard) and on the web makes a URL: /tracker/#t=<the text, deflated, base64url>. Nothing is sent to a server; the tune lives in the link. The budget is 16,384 characters (a three-minute tune is about 2,700); over it the page offers the .cts as a file instead. Opening the link opens the tune.

The file itself is text: motif tune print writes it canonically, so a tune saved by the tracker, printed by motif and edited by an agent over motif mcp is one file with no conversion.

On a phone

Play-only. Four channels at scale 2 fill the screen, a bar at the bottom holds ‹ PLAY STOP LOOP › (previous order entry, play from the cursor row, stop, loop the pattern, next entry), a tap on the grid's upper or lower third pages the cursor, and the share link opens there as it does anywhere. There is no editing on a phone: the tracker's keyboard model is the editor, and the phone is for listening to what someone shared.