Aleksi Eeben

Finnish coder-musician (29 in July 2005; Southern Finland; "Sound designer by trade, employed and underpaid by a mobile phone company") who wrote two C64 music tools — the low-rastertime editor John Player and the four-channel sample tracker Polly Tracker (2005) — and has composed and programmed for C64, Amiga, PC, Game Boy and, his favourite, the VIC 20, "because it's the most limited and least explored so far" (source: s-sidin08-eeben-interview).

Facts#

• John Player: a C64 SID editor written because he "found all other editors too difficult to learn, so I wrote my own. Low rastertime came as a bonus, as I wanted to keep it as simple as possible" — Tognon calls it "one on the less rasterline consuming editor around" (sid-player-routine, tracker); he grumbles that hvsc "seems to hold every single 10 second test song I've made for for example John Player" (source: s-sidin08-eeben-interview).
• Polly Tracker (released July 2005): a 4-channel sample editor grown from the 3-channel "mod" player of his VIC 20 demo Back in the Good Old Days (Assembly 2004). Its method — poll the four CIA timers in a busy loop ("hence the name Polly"), mix the four channels whenever one advances, output through the volume register $D418, a muted SID voice 3 as the tempo clock read at $D41B, a guard against the CIA timer-B bug — reaches "9 kHz sample rate on all four channels" without resampling artefacts; details on chip-samples (source: s-sidin08-eeben-interview).
• Plans he described in 2005: a player mixing 3 SID voices with 2–4 sampled voices would need interrupt-driven samples, perhaps two mixing modes (busy-loop while the SID code is idle, interrupt mixing while it runs) (source: s-sidin08-eeben-interview).
• Tiny Sid Compo 2005: his 256-byte entry Electronic came 4th (151 points); it relocates itself into the zero page, keeps a full SID register image, sweeps voice 1's pulse by $0C per frame, toggles voice 2's pitch with eor #$40 and drives the low-pass cutoff on voice 3 from the voice's own envelope output ($D41C) — "the code is more articulated" than the other entries, Tognon writes (tiny-sid-compo; source: s-sidin09-tiny-sid-256b).
• Release history (from SIDin's news pages): JohnPlayer 1.6 / 2.0 beta (#2, 2002-11-21) — 1.6 "uses only 7 rasterline", the 2.0 beta improves the sound table and sequencer steps at 8 rasterlines; Polly Tracker 0.9 beta / 1.0 (2005-07-13; "a four channel sample-based music editor", 8-bit unsigned raw samples at 4–9 kHz, 8-bit internal mixing with 4-bit output, "No SID voices used (except voice 3 output as sequencer sync :)", 48 K for samples), 1.1 (2005-07-19), 1.2 (2005-08-20), 1.2+ (March 2007; a Digimax version with 8-bit output); a PollyTracker Compo ran August–September 2005 (Abaddon Polyhunter first) (source: s-sidin-news-digest).
• Opinions: "Always test on the real machine, but emulators are great for cross-development"; reSID "is quite accurate except for the filter. This could be improved a lot by trying different cliptables before the filter input"; 6581 "definately. It's the SID sound for me" (sid, vice); favourite SID authors TBB, AMJ, GRG, Goto80, Reed, Abaddon, Agemixer, Ed, Dane; best SIDs "Unsound Minds tunes by AMJ"; likes jazz "but also Venetian Snares" (source: s-sidin08-eeben-interview).
• Download he gave: http://pleco.mikrolahti.fi/~ae/download/pollytracker.zip (source: s-sidin08-eeben-interview).

Compo placings in the SIDin news (2002–2005)#

• c64.sk SID Compos: 11th in II (2002, "RoundBlueRath", as Aleksi Eeben/CNCD), "Purity" in III (2003, 30 jury points), 14th in IV (2004, "Second Steps", as aeb/Carillon); his PollyTracker Compo (August–September 2005) placed Abaddon "Polyhunter" 98/110, Randall "Poly wants a tracker" 96.5 and E. Jones "Supernoid" 87.5 (compos; source: s-sidin-news-digest).

Related#

chip-samples · sid-player-routine · tiny-sid-compo · sid · hvsc · tracker · sidin

Sources#

s-sidin08-eeben-interview · s-sidin09-tiny-sid-256b · s-sidin-news-digest