May take between 15 and 20 seconds to load - please be patient! Sometimes it takes longer if you're loading a custom playlist via the URL - usually a second or two per song.
ChipdiscoDJ is a twin-deck MOD/XM/S3M player, set up like DJ software and with many of the same features. Needless to say, because modules are much better
than MP3s, WAVs and other rendered audio files, you can do very cool stuff by digging into the notes as they're calculated and played on the fly by the player engine. Adjust speed without adjusting pitch! Change pitch without
altering speed! Mute individual instruments or channels! Trigger sub-pattern loops (a la Ableton Live) with pinpoint timing accuracy! Also, because modules are usually very small, you can roll up to a party with ChipdiscoDJ and
a bunch of tunes on a floppy disk and kill that shit dead. No floppies? Don't worry - you can load files from other websites by copying the URLs! Aaaawesome.
ChipdiscoDJ is fun to play with online, but some browser configurations are picky about Java and ChipdiscoDJ may run better on your computer as a desktop application:
Drag a song from the playlist and drop it onto Deck A to get started.
The crossfader works like, well, a crossfader. Drag it from side to side to pretend you're a famous DJ/artless fucking chancer!
Speaking of which, BEATMATCHING: you can do a quick'n'dirty beatmatch by setting each deck's BPM to the same value, then hitting SPACEBAR. Spacebar skips both decks back to row 0 of their current pattern (almost
always a bar-line or the start of a phrase). It's possible to get quite convincing results, but they might not hold up to high levels of scrutiny or sobriety on the part of an audience. My advice is to get your crossfading done
quick before everything starts to go wrong.
The spectrum display also acts as progress meter and seek bar. Click the mouse on the display to whizz through the tune.
The coloured blocks indicate note activity per channel, so you know that the deck's still playing when the crossfader's on the other side and the spectrum stops wiggling (this is necessary for some
extremely boring reasons that I won't go into now).
Dropdowns are for selecting MIDI devices, secondary outputs for the cue-mix feature and colourschemes. MIDI and soundcard stuff might break in the browser version; it's fairly solid in native versions.
Chipdisco does NOT automatically advance to the next song in the playlist... If you want to leave a playlist of songs running one after another while you go to the bar/toilet/home, use one of the many
fine module players available on the Internet (like XMplay for Windows, for instance). If you want to mix, match, juggle and mangle your mods in front of an appreciative audience, however, ChipdiscoDJ is for you!
You can access the online (applet) version of ChipdiscoDJ using extra URL arguments in order to recall your favourite settings or automatically load your own playlists into each deck on startup. Let me break it down:
'plist': an .m3u playlist file
'cue': Cue device (stay with me)
'midi': MIDI device (pay attention at the back, there)
'col': Colour scheme
'int': Interpolation (if you don't know what this is, you don't need to know. Interpolation is switched off by default, as lots of modules sound awful with it enabled and many composers request in the infotext that it be left off. However, sometimes it's useful for making bad samples sound better, or for taking the edge off the classic grating Amiga sound :)
'curve': Default crossfader behaviour
'slice': Default slice trigger behaviour
Contstruct the URL thuswise: http://crayolon.net/chipdisco/index.php?col=2&int=1 or [...]/index.php?midi=2&cue=2&plist=http://boobs.netz/myplaylist.m3u or any combination of arguments, in any order. If you want to load
an m3u playlist, it has to be stored somewhere else online and the paths it contains have to be FULLY QUALIFIED domain/filename paths. An m3u file is simply a textfile renamed '.m3u' with the location of each file on
its own line. Some media players insert metadata when generating m3u files but Chipdisco ignores this. If you have paths to files on your own computer, those tunes will only load when you're on your own computer!
Here's a working example, anyway:
http://crayolon.net/chipdisco/index.php?col=4&plist=http://crayolon.net/chipdisco/chiplistA.m3u&int=0&cue=0&midi=2&curve=1&slice=0
Loading an archived module via URL: I'd better say some words about this, since it can be troublesome... It works perfectly, but only in some very specific circumstances :) For now, the module has to be
in the root of the archive (i.e. not in a subdirectory) and only module files can be in the archive. This goes for GZ, ZIP and LHA, although I'm working on expanding the support so it'll fish everything out
of an archive and add it to the playlist.
A note is also needed about loading any modules or m3u files via URL: currently, and I can't figure out why, the applet won't follow HTTP redirects. You know when you get download.php?url=blah.net/blah.mod&id;=12435?
It usually means the website owner is spreading their server load by randomly selecting from a bunch of mirror sites; fine, but it means my function can't see a direct link to the file so it throws an error. As with the
above issue I'm working on it, but for now it sadly means that sites like TheModArchive and Amp.dascene.net can't easily be linked to in playlists. In the meantime, download a zipped module, open the archive, then drag
the mod straight out of the zip and over ChipdiscoDJ to load it. Works in Windows, should work in other environments.
Right-click and 'Save As'
to download a nanoKontrol scene data file for use with ChipdiscoDJ. MIDI control can be achieved with almost any MIDI kit, but you'll have to assign all the CCs yourself. Most
modern equipment comes with configuration software that makes this a lot easier. All the values you'll need are in the list below. Be warned - as ChipdiscoDJ doesn’t send MIDI out to controllers,
there’s no way of resetting toggles which use LEDs when enabled. This means that when you load a new tune, you might still have active ‘mute’ or ‘pause’ lights. If so, ignore them; they’re lying
to you. (more to come):