ShortAndSweet

The latest version is ShortAndSweet v0.01a, released on 12/28/09.

ShortandSweet v0.01a - Windows - Linux

(Note: large download ~20MB, contains .wav files!)

Description

ShortAndSweet is a sort of musical toy based on a simple flash (?) toy that I once saw on someone's website. He's since taken the original down, but it was pretty neat, so I thought I'd do something similar.

Check out GrooveNet for a revamped version of this concept.

Essentially, you click the little gray squares to toggle 4-bar loops of music on and off. In essence, you can sequence the tracks in real time, which is pretty cool to play around with.

I made this back in 2006 and never released it. It's probably buggy and not very polished at all, but at this point I'm not sure it's really worth revisiting. I managed to get it into a workable (?) state in order to release it, but that's all.

Known Issues

-Uses wave files and bitmaps, making the download a lot larger than it should be if I used more reasonable formats. =(

-Looks for resources in the current directory instead of the directory that the executable is in. Meaning, if you try to run it from a different directory, it'll probably complain about not being able to load required files.

-Default layout screen says v0.00a instead of v0.01a.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Halp! It doesn't work/crashes/eats my computer!

A: You're on your own. This is an alpha release that wasn't originally intended to see the light of day anyways.

Q: (Linux) Where can I find the Allegro library?

A: Package managers should have it under liballegro4.2

Alternatively, you can grab it here: http://alleg.sourceforge.net/

Q: Is there an OS X version?

A: Not at the moment. You might want to check out GrooveNet instead.

Q: What was this originally based on?

A: A similar musical toy that was featured on analoq's website at one point.

Q: This is really cool! You should make it better! =D

A: Thanks! ^^; If you really want to check out something better, you can look at SGX's Coactive audio toy.

Q: How did you make ShortAndSweet?

A: Short answer: C++.

Long answer: ShortAndSweet is programmed in C++, and uses the Allegro game programming library. The Windows build was developed in Visual Studio, but the release build was compiled using MinGW. The Linux build was compiled with g++ under VMWare running Ubuntu 9.10 RC. The music loops were made using FL Studio.

Q: Is the source code available?

A: Nope. It's kind of messy and I've since learned much better programming practices. *laughs*

Q: Can I redistribute ShortAndSweet?

A: Please just link people to this page instead.