Faunatone
A tracker-style microtonal MIDI sequencer. Since MIDI does not have any widely-implemented native support for microtonality, Faunatone uses pitch bending to play non-12edo pitches. The tradeoff is that in this model, you cannot generally have more than 15-voice melodic polyphony without experiencing artifacts, although GM 1 only guarantees 16 melodic voices anyway.
Management of individual output MIDI channels by the user is not required or even possible; Faunatone operates in terms of virtual channels which it maps dynamically.
Features
- First-class support for various approaches to microtonality
- MIDI input, output, and export including support for all GM 1 channel events
- Remap keyboard and MIDI note input (intervals and layout)
- Control how pitches are notated
- Free transposition and modulation (with notation caveats)
- Define and use accidentals to modify pitches
- Flexible rhythms via freely variable beat division
- Import Scala scale files
Status
Faunatone has not seen extensive testing and it is still under initial development. Users may experience quirks, bugs, crashes, design changes, etc, although backwards-incompatible changes to the save and config file formats are less likely to happen.
Download
Prebuilt standalone binaries for Windows and Linux are available from the releases page.
Differences from other trackers
If you are familiar with tracker interfaces (Renoise, OpenMPT, SunVox, etc), you will probably not have trouble picking up Faunatone. If you are not familiar with tracker interfaces, then maybe find a tutorial somewhere? Faunatone does make a few significant departures from "conventional" trackers:
- There are no "rows"; beats can be divided into arbitrarily many equal divisions, and events are placed with MIDI tick precision (in this case, 960 ticks per beat). The beat division can be adjusted on the fly using menus or keyboard shortcuts; this only affects the cursor's behavior and does not change the timing of any events that were already placed.
- There are no "columns", only "tracks" that can each contain any type of event. Multiple tracks can be associated with the same virtual "channel" such that ex. a controller change in a track labeled "channel 1" will affect all tracks with that label.
- There are no "patterns"; a song is one continuous sequence of events.
- As in most trackers, the mapping of keys to intervals/pitches defaults to 12edo, but this is completely configurable and the mapping can be changed at any time. Pitches that don't have names in the current mapping are displayed numerically instead of symbolically.
Also, percussion notes are entered by holding the Shift key. The keymap for percussion notes is separate from the keymap for melodic notes.
File format
Faunatone save files (*.faun) are zlib-compressed JSON.
Further documentation
- usage.md: general usage guide
- commands.md: menu commands
- keymaps.md: note input mapping and notation
- config.md: other configuration files
- building.md: building from source
