JCH editor & NewPlayer

The native C64 music editor and player family of JCH (Jens-Christian Huus, Vibrants) — the most influential of the private 1980s editors: scarzix, Drax and goto80 composed in it, laxity wrote its last player generation and grew SID Factory (later sid-factory-ii) out of it, and cheesecutter opens its work files and carries its player and stacked view onto the PC. The wiki's account is first-hand: JCH's 2017 memoir and his scanned period notes (sources: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles, s-chordian-player-editor-notes).

Facts#

• OldPlayer (spring 1987): JCH's first, CPU-heavy player, waveform swapping "done programmatically instead of using a flexible table"; tunes composed in Aegis Sonix on the Amiga and transferred to the C64 on paper (a 1987-12-18 sheet: five hours writing down, 3.5 hours typing in). He was "among just two or three people in Denmark" with an own player in the soundmonitor era (sources: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles, s-chordian-player-editor-notes).
• NewPlayer (from July 1988): restarted from scratch right after laxity told him at the Dexion Meeting to stop using Laxity's reverse-engineered player (JCH had made ~6 tunes in it — "he actually did the scene a great favor"); grown "from a prototype version with mere bleeps to one with pulsating, arpeggio and drums using a table of waveforms, all within a sensible use of CPU time" (instrument-tables, sid-player-routine) (source: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles).
• The editor's design predates Amiga SoundTracker: his dream was that "a music editor should be able to" compare voices directly — three voices side by side with independent sequences of any size (unlike SoundTracker's voices "fused together in the same pattern"), everything on one screen (tables in a hotkey half-pane), a consistent green look. The earliest sketches show notes as horizontal bars before the downward note-columns idea — this is the stacked track view that cheesecutter preserved (tracker, orderlist) (sources: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles, s-chordian-player-editor-notes, s-sidin14-scarzix-interview).
• Editor versions: v1 November 1988 (with "infinitely long voices" as a corner cut); v2 December 1988 (flexible-size independent sequences — "a massive leap from composing directly in an assembler listing"; this is the version eventually leaked); v3 from December 1990, cross-developed on EASS (Henning Andersen / Einstein of Upfront's Amiga→C64 hardware assembler, replacing turbo-assembler), adding follow-play — "the channels scrolling to the music" — quick-player support, tune/work clocks, global volume and poly-play; final v3.04 (SX-64/C128 compatible) August 1991 (source: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles). SIDwave's "1989 saw the light of day" dates the users, not the editor (s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid).
• NewPlayer versions (NN.GN scheme): version 5 when Link of Cheyens became the first outside user (~February 1989, for Golddigger); notes survive for 10.G0 (packer + relocator), 15.G7, and 17.G1 — "the hard-restart implementation in NewPlayer 17.G1" (the Lostack database names exactly JCH 02/NEWPLAYER V17.G1); goto80 used 20.G4 on a real C64 (2002); 21.g4/g5 Final (2006) were "coded by laxity to use with JCH". sidid carries signatures JCH_OldPlayer and JCH_NewPlayer V1–V20 (Dane's 2011 "JCH-editor 3.1 + NP22-25"), plus JCH_Protracker and JCH_DigiPlayer. Player code sits at $1000 (sources: s-chordian-player-editor-notes, s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles, s-sidin05-pattern-searching-2, s-remix64-goto80-interview, s-sidin-news-digest, s-sidid-player-list).
• Tool family: a packer ("concatenated note steps into fewer bytes with duration indicators"), a player version swapper, a relocator, a splitter (spreads player and data over several memory chunks), a separate SFX player/editor ("could do a lot more sound effect tricks than the music player"; used for Orcus, Su-Sweet, Hugo and others), and the Delux Driver (plays packed tunes with notes lighting an on-screen keyboard) (sources: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles, s-chordian-player-editor-notes).
• Controlled distribution: no public release — each personal copy carried an individual byte code and JCH "kept strict note of the users" (the list survives in his scans; Zenox of Starion rejected a copy). About half a dozen users by spring 1989, "the most noteworthy … Link, Scorpio and scarzix"; Drax (from June 1989) "produced tunes like an assembly line … almost a thousand C64 tunes"; Metal too (sources: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles, s-chordian-player-editor-notes, s-sidin14-scarzix-interview).
• Legacy: laxity's SID Factory (2007) "has inherited a lot of features and look from the JCH editor" while "programmed from scratch" — the line to sid-factory-ii; cheesecutter (2009–) opens JCH work files in its 0-series, bases its player on "NP21.G4 by Laxity" (the 2-series forks it as NP21.B6), keeps JCH byte semantics in its tables and the "Super Table" command-table idea, and shipped a depack-jch20g4 companion tool with its 0.5.1 release (source: s-cheesecutter-guide); goto80 "settled with JCH's editor" from the late 1990s, sequenced a 2007 live show in it, and jammed Papaya Dub with frantic on "the 8×-speed JCH editor" before defmon existed (sources: s-sidin-news-digest, s-sidin14-scarzix-interview, s-cheesecutter-repo-and-releases, s-remix64-goto80-interview, s-goto80-site-defmon-posts).
• JCH on the editor: "Having made a tool that other composers liked to use was a great feeling that I haven't topped with any other piece of software since" (source: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles).

Related#

chordian · laxity · cheesecutter · sid-factory-ii · scarzix · goto80 · hard-restart · instrument-tables · sid-player-routine · orderlist · soundmonitor · future-composer · sidid · player-identification

Sources#

s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles · s-chordian-player-editor-notes · · s-cheesecutter-guide s-sidin14-scarzix-interview · s-sidid-player-list · s-sidin-news-digest · s-sidin05-pattern-searching-2 · s-cheesecutter-repo-and-releases · s-remix64-goto80-interview · s-goto80-site-defmon-posts · s-sidin11-laxity-interview