A while back, I was spending a lot of time on trains. And I thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if I could make music on the train?". So I ended up investigating Nitrotracker for the Nintendo DS-Lite ...Read on ...Setting Up
(This is covered on the Nitrotracker site, but I'll add my own notes because it can be a bit confusing)
Nitrotracker is homebrew, which means you need a third-party storage cartridge, such as the M3 DS Simply. Such cartridges usually accept a MicroSD card, so basically, you download Nitrotracker from the net, copy it onto the MicroSD card, then slot the card into your M3 DS Simply (or whatever) cartridge. Well, except that its not quite that simple. You have to patch your copy of the .nds file:
Patching
The 'executable' file that you download from Nitrotracker is an .nds file. These files can be run by storage cartridges such as the M3 DS Simply. However, each type of storage cartridge handles file saving slightly differently, which means the executable .nds file needs to be modified depending on what sort of storage cartridge you are running it on.
The 'patching' process essentially overwrites part of the .nds file with the correct instructions for file saving for your particular cartridge. This Patching process has been figured out and made as smooth as possible by some of the DS homebrew developers. They call it DLDI.
How you patch your copy of Nitrotracker will depend on what sort of storage cartridge you have (the ones that work are listed here). But here's what I did for my M3 DS Simply:
- Downloaded DLDITool - this is one of the utilities that helps perform the 'patch'. There are others listed here.
- Downloaded the DLDI patch for the M3 DS Simply. Patches for other storage cartridges are listed here.
- Ran the DLDITool utility to perform that patching. For me, that was a DOS command along the lines of "dlditool r4tf.dldi nitrotracker.nds"
- Copied the patched version of nitrotracker.nds onto my MicroSD card
If you dont patch your nitrotracker.nds file, you will probably find that you can't save files. Although apparently some recent versions of the storage cartridges have DLDI patching built in, and will do it automatically for you.
Using Nitrotracker
How to use Nitrotracker is covered extensively elsewhere, such as the documentation and the forum. So I'm just going to give my personal impressions of it. Your mileage may vary. By the way I was using version 0.3 but 0.4 is out now.
Its ingeniously designed, and its a lot of fun to play with. Its a Tracker so you need to be happy working in a tracker sortof setup. There's a surprising amount of things you can do the the samples (edit them within the program, and envelopes were added for v0.4 I believe). You can also record directly from the DS's microphone, which is fun.
It turns out that the DS-lite only has 4Meg of RAM, a surprisingly small amount, and so the number of samples you can load and use (as well as the length of your track) is limited by this. There's still plenty you can do, but it does mean you can't have many long samples.
I spent a happy few hours making my first few tracks. But then I didn't ever go back to it much. I think this was mostly because I don't much like the 'tracker' way of doing things, I prefer a piano-roll interface to a vertically scrolling list of notes. Trackers like this are generally great for beat-oriented music, but if you're trying to do more harmonies and chords, the lack of piano roll is a bit limiting. Or it is for the way I work, anyway.
I think Tobias Weyand has done a brilliant job with this program, but its just not the right sort of interface for me. It did make me realise how powerful touchscreen interfaces can be ... perhaps its time to look at iPhone music apps ...
And in the end, I never did get round to using it on the train; the train shakes around too much, making it hard to use the touchscreen.
Here's one of the tracks I did manage to make:
nitrotracker clip clop
Here's a much better track by someone else: Mysrysare by nitro2k01.
See also the featured tracks on the Nitrotracker site.
This short video (by someone else) shows Nitrotracker in action:
... and this video (also by someone else) shows what can be achieved if you really persevere : )