Tek – A music making program for 24-bit Unicode terminals

104 smartmic 13 5/15/2025, 7:56:59 PM codeberg.org ↗

Comments (13)

MarcelOlsz · 6h ago
I love the top down tracker UI. For some more you can look at Aphex Twin using PlayerPRO [0] and Hitori Tori using Renoise [1]

[0] https://vimeo.com/223378825

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnJY5u6cC7A

Both are mindblowing.

alisonatwork · 4h ago
This program doesn't look top down to me, it seems like the main sequencing interface is piano roll, although the sample editing looks tracker-inspired. It'll be interesting to see what people do with it. Maybe fans of piano roll will find a lightweight way to get their ideas down that feels simpler than a full Ableton setup?

For me I still find piano roll awkward to read. I can't visualize what the music is going to sound like the way I can with a tracker pattern. Perhaps it's because my eyes need to scan left and right and up and down too much to see what each note is? Let's not even get into the problem of having effects configured on a totally different screen. When I transitioned from tracker to hardware and later to Ableton I felt like I wasn't really writing music any more, I was just rearranging sounds till they eventually turned into music. It made for perhaps more surprising and interesting results, but I never really got back the feeling of control and finesse that I had with trackers.

genewitch · 5h ago
I bought playerpro and we used it for a while, been a long time since I thought of it. I just checked my old Mac CD case and it's not in there, oh well. We also switched to reason around version 3-5.
duskwuff · 3h ago
It's open-source now, but never made the transition to 64-bit APIs.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/playerpro/

MarcelOlsz · 5h ago
If you ever do find that disc I'd love to buy it from you lol.
montag · 5h ago
nit: Renoise; good stuff, thanks for sharing.
neilv · 6h ago
In case anyone else wondered, it doesn't seem to involve Tek (Tektronix) terminal graphics. Maybe the name was an homage?
tzmlab · 5h ago
montag · 7h ago
Really awesome UI. Is there a quick YouTube demo?
yahoozoo · 4h ago
Are there any DAWs that support VIM keybinds?
alisonatwork · 2h ago
I remember seeing one a while ago, and a quick websearch leads me to this Reaper plugin: https://github.com/gwatcha/reaper-keys

I think I wouldn't hate a modal tracker nowadays. In the old days when everyone had gigantic keyboards it didn't seem so bad to depend on numpad and F keys and so on, but nowadays it might be cleaner to be more vim-like.

RIMR · 52m ago
For the non-arch users, the build script has a typo:

Don't use bin/, use build/

Sharlin · 6h ago
Oh no, you're supposed to have the channels on the x-axis and time on the y-axis ;) mutters about good old days