⚡ NEW: Playdate music box - Collection
Music Box for Playdate
A downloadable game
Why not take a short break from fast-paced games and high score chasing? Download this music box and turn your Playdate into a tiny musical instrument!
Select one of the well-known tunes included in the app and start turning the crank to advance the music. You can also get creative and compose your own short song with the built-in editor.
See the official instructions for how to install this on your device.
- Manual crank: play the tune forwards (or backwards!) by manually turning the crank.
- Wind-up crank: first turn the crank a few times to wind up the music box before the tune auto-plays for a while. The auto-play speed can be selected freely.
- Compose your own tunes by manually toggling notes on the cylinder on or off.
- Adjustable tune lengths: each song can be between 20 and 128 notes.
- All 18 notes in the music box can be individually tuned for each songs: you can use notes between C3 and B6, including semitones.
If you created a cool tune, feel free to share it with others! You can access the individual files by connecting your Playdate to a computer and booting up in data disk mode. The tunes are located in the directory
Data -> user.???.com.tizianzeltner.musicbox -> tunes.
User generated song files can be found and uploaded here.
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Release 1.1.4Jan 27, 2024
- Release 1.1.3Jan 17, 2024
- Bugfix release 1.1.2Dec 09, 2023
- Release 1.1.1Jun 14, 2023
- Release 1.1Mar 03, 2023
- Bugfix release 1.0.4Jan 08, 2023
- Bugfix release 1.0.3Jan 04, 2023
- Bugfix release 1.0.2Jan 01, 2023
Comments
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So nice! Thank you!
I was wanting something just like this, thank you!
Thanks for this amazing music box! I spent all afternoon fiddling with it and it feels so simple to use yet the results are so nice!
It's also the first digital instrument of this type which I could finally use to transcribe All Was Well by Wintergatan, I uploaded the first part it in your shared folder (great idea btw).
I don't know if that would be possible because I don't know the Playdate's limitations but I'd love to be able to create songs longer than 128 notes in the future :)
This is a fun and simple music maker. I remember visiting a museum with old piano rolls and thinking about what tunes I would put into a music box if I could. Right away, I created about 30 tunes, mostly from classic games. Once I make more, I plan to share them.
How can I make songs with a much more length than 128?
Where can I upload my songs, that I created on the computer, using the emulator, cause I have no money for the expensive playdate?
It says right on the page here the directory you need to find to get your song files, and there should be an emulated version accessible in the Playdate Simulator.
I need Puppet Music Box from FNAF 2! Can some one make this, please?
Can someone make a playdate simulator for pc, like gameplay emulator?
No .exe for windows? How can I play this on windows?
its not for windows its for a indie game console called the playdate by panic
I don't pay fifty dollar, or how much it costs!
Well then its probably not a game for you. Just like you cant play PlayStation 5 games on Pc. Im sure youll find games with similar functionality on windows^^ also im pretty sure the console actually costs 200$ its pretty expensive.
I know, but I want to play this game!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Why would they 200$+? I don't know, what the people have for problems with money. Look at my projects on my page, and you know, how much I want for most of my projects. That is mostly on a much lower price!
Okay? Why should a luxury good be sold at your price point? There's room in this world for free games, $5 games, $20 consoles, $60 games, $200 consoles, and everything in between. You're acting like a child because you can't afford something.
can't open the game how do i start it?
i was looking for some music-creation app on the playdate and it seemed impossible until i stumbled upon this masterpiece. it's just what i was looking for, thank you so much for creating this awesome app! :)))
<3
I want harry potter Please ! :)
Hey! 😊 I loved this app, but I don't know anything about "creating music"... Do you have any tips on how I can create new songs? Thanks!!
Thanks! I also don’t have much musical experience, my tips would be to not worry too much and just try simple little melodies that you know well. There’s a few “advanced features” like changing the keys for the individual notes—but these can be safely be ignored at the beginning.
Otherwise, some users are sharing more tunes to download in this folder.
Thank you so much!!
I have always wanted to buy one of those hand-wind music boxes and this, is by far, way superior. Thank you so much for making it!
<3
I have a suggestion for future development: it would be nice if there were a place in the tune file for some limited commentary or info beyond just the name of the tune. Extra nice would be if the commentary could be surfaced in the app somehow.
Here is a bigger, pie-in-the-sky suggestion: provide, in the app, a way to browse the user songs repository and to download tunes.I see this has been discussed before.I've been spending a silly amount of time creating tunes for the app. Much fun!
Any They Might Be Giants fans on board here? I uploaded a couple of TMBG tunes to the user songs repository.
Very nice!
what do you think about adding a tempo setting for wind-up mode?
sometimes, more intricate textures don't sound right at medium or fast, but would really settle nicely somewhere in between. an exact tempo setting would give greater nuance to songs. If you want to really go bonkers, the ability to save each song's tempo setting would be incredible!
That’s a good idea. What would be a good unit / way to specify the tempo?
beats per minute (bpm) as an integer value would likely be best. this would replace the descriptive speed settings that are currently implemented. if you want to get fancy, you could have the Italian tempo names display in the tempo selection menu when the corresponding numeric values are selected (i.e. "Allegro" when the user selects a bpm between 109 and 132).
I know that Music Box begins omitting consecutive notes at faster speeds, so a high tempo limit just before that happens would be perfect.
the low value could be around 40. anything less that doesn't have much practical purpose, though I suppose there's no harm in setting it to 1.
you could call it something other than bpm, since it's really notes per minute
Yeah notes per minute sounds like the clearest option. (BPM is potentially confusing because it won’t quite be what people usually expect it to be.)
I was looking into the code requirements of this a bit yesterday and it should be totally doable. This also made me realize that the “NPM” are quite high for all three settings currently. And really somewhat arbitrary: Slow: ~195 NPM Medium: ~260 NPM Fast: ~390 NPM
An integer option for this (per tune) would be a nice addition indeed.
looking forward to this! i've sunk some serious time into this app
while the values you already have for speed might seem high, the npm can be anywhere from two to four times greater than the bpm for a song. the notes for most songs are going to be a fragment of a beat, maybe half a beat, or even a third or fourth of a beat.
some of the songs i've transcribed would sound best at around 600 npm if the smallest unit in the rhythm is a sixteenth. this would equate to 150 bpm. by the same reasoning, the lowest reasonable npm for songs using eighth notes would be around 40, as that would be 20 bpm.
my idea of using italian tempo names in the menu is probably not going to work out, since npm doesn't account for meter and division of the beats. 260 npm would be Vivace (130 bpm) if ♪eighths♪ are the shortest value, but Adagio (65 bpm) if ♬sixteenths♬ are the shortest value. i don't think there will be an easy way to incorporate it
tried this out for the first time today and it was soooooo fun! thanks for creating such a whimsical and creative experience.
others have mentioned that longer length would be nice. I'm in that camp, but I'm only asking for 8 more steps. 128 steps would allow for a perfect loop of 8, 16 or 32 measures, depending on the rhythm and meter used. 120 steps is allllllmoooost enough to get a full phrase finished before the loop resets.
i made a track for korobeiniki, but couldn't quite finish the song before the loop came around again at 120 steps. would love to be able to get it right :)
Alright! 128 is actually a much nicer number (2^7). That indeed adds a couple of more options for measures as you mention. I uploaded an updated version 1.1.3.
THANK YOU SOOOOO MUCH!
you've made your already great app that much better <3
here's the product of our combined efforts:
Korobeiniki
Paid $8, worth more!
This game is one of the biggest reasons I got the console, and I wasn't disappointed! Being able to create tunes even longer than a normal music box is really cool! I love the manual/auto crank option.
Only bug I had is that for some reason when I went to use a period "." in my name the playdate crashed. Happened again when I tried again.
Thank you! Kind messages like this are the best thing about making something for the playdate community. <3
I’m able to reproduce the “.” bug on my device and I’ll look into it when I find some time. Thanks for reporting that.
hey I appreciate that, thank you for putting in a lot of great work!
I pushed out an update (1.1.2) that should address the problem: https://tizian.itch.io/playdate-music-box/devlog/647665/bugfix-release-112