Johan Kotlinski

Swedish programmer and musician, author of lsdj and its manual (copyright Johan Kotlinski; the v9.2.6 manual is dated 9 May 2021). The manual points to the user-maintained wiki, the LSDj Facebook group and info@littlesounddj.com for questions, and to the lsdpatcher program for kits, fonts and song management (source: s-lsdj-manual). He was interviewed by defense-mechanism for intense-tech in February 2020; the facts below come from that interview (source: s-intense-tech-13-kotlinski-interview).

Background#

• Grew up with the Commodore 64 and Amiga "like many others in Sweden"; programming since about the age of twelve. In the early 1990s he used ProTracker and shared .mod files on BBSes and over FidoNet (techno, house, IDM); "chip music" at that time meant keygen-style .mods with tiny looped samples (chiptune). He also liked C64 SID music and games such as Paul van der Valk's Poing.
• Mid-1990s: the Amiga's Musicline Editor — "it was possible to create new sounds rather than just using samples", and "the vertical workflow made it easier for me to actually finish songs"; with ProTracker and later Cubase on a PC he "mostly made loops and had difficulties actually finishing anything" (tracking-workflow).
• 1998: founded the CD-R label Bleep Street (about 50 copies per release); 2000: pressed Goto80's Papaya EP on 7″ vinyl, which sold about a thousand copies.
• Releases his own music as "rolemodel" (on micromusic.net; 8bitpeoples release 8BP047, A New Fragrance).

LSDj#

• Started around 2000 for the Game Boy Color — "in 2000 it was not that 'retro' but rather the most popular handheld" — as "probably the first thing I worked on that went over a thousand lines" and his first assembly code. Cartridges were sold over the internet and through a Stockholm record store; micromusic.net and other early online communities turned Game Boy music into "a movement of sorts".
• Live mode (January 2001) was inspired by Ableton Live's beta, which Tobi-Wan of Puss showed him as a beta tester; he lived in Berlin a few blocks from Ableton in October 2001.
• Changes he calls "maybe nice or at least interesting": the optimised dual-kit sample mixing of 1.4.0 ("happy for days" when it ran on the DMG), the file screen with RLE compression of 3.0.0 (after which LSDj "started to become as popular as Nanoloop"), prelisten in 3.9.5 ("for some, it felt like cheating"), and the new pitch engine of 5.1.0 — "actually a total disaster" that took long to match the old engine "in terms of kick crafting" but produced the accurate vibrato of later versions (pitch-slide-and-portamento). His summary: "There are no shortcuts to the perfect sound."
• What keeps him developing: "Certainly that people keep on using and caring about it!" In early 2020 the roadmap was the stable version 8 (accurate vibrato, de-clicked WAV playback, slowed-down C, probability sequencing, higher maximum tempo, wave finetune, optimised playback, high-speed retrig) and multi-stage envelopes for pulse and noise, which shipped as the ADSR of 8.1.x (adsr-envelope); the wave channel "has lots of untapped potential now that it is virtually clickfree". Requests go to the LSDj Wishlist wiki page, the Facebook group or e-mail.

From the 2012 and 2014 interviews#

Source: s-chipmusic-kotlinski-interviews. Friends in the demo group Hack n' Trade shared his C64/Amiga interests; around 2000 they bought Game Boys, backup cartridges and programmers together, and "the obvious thing to do was a music program" — to see what an interface of few buttons and a small screen allowed and "what the Game Boy sound chip could achieve when being pushed to its limits". LSDj is built with a C compiler he calls "incredibly buggy" (so C plus the assembly he mentions in 2020); stability was his 2012 priority. He is a programmer by trade; his favourite LSDj musician "for old times sake" is Lo-Bat; by 2012 the users numbered "thousands" where he had hoped for a hundred. He prefers the original Game Boy despite its screen, tried Nanoloop before LSDj existed ("a beat making toy rather than something I would like to make full songs in"), and would rather improve the sound chip's dynamics than the program. His own bass: pulse, duty 15 or 25 on the first tick, then 50 (pulse-width-modulation). In 2014: "The real strength is in musical arrangement" — from a first idea to a finished song "without getting lost in distractions"; newer musicians he liked were Toriena and Trey Frey; his own tricks "must anyway be outdated by now".

Distribution and tools (2019–2021, as seen by Intense Tech)#

• LSDj is distributed as a ROM image that users flash onto their own cartridges: there is no "official LSDJ cartridge", the licence disallows selling cartridges with it, and cartridge makers such as insideGadgets flash "the LSDj rom of your choice" on request (source: s-intense-tech-16-cartridge-family); lsdpatch's "Upgrade ROM" fetches the latest stable, development or Arduinoboy build and keeps the user's kits, palettes and fonts (source: s-intense-tech-20-lsdpatch). This confirms the previously unconfirmed note that LSDj is no longer sold on physical cartridges, as it was around 2000.
• Two utilities live in his GitHub account: LSDManager (jkotlinski/lsdmanager), the older song manager that loads one save at a time — "tedious" for large collections, which is why 4ntler's liblsdj tools were written (source: s-intense-tech-04-liblsdj) — and LSDPatch (jkotlinski/lsdpatch, 1.10.4 in February 2021), which absorbed LSDManager's song management and adds the kit, font and palette editors (source: s-intense-tech-20-lsdpatch).
• defense-mechanism chronicled the versions of 2020–2021: 7.7.4 with the B command, silky wave and the R8x retrig ("the benevolent developer Johan Kotlinski has been hard at work"; source: s-intense-tech-12-scoping-out-new-features); 8 with ADSR and the optimisations that ended the three-V-command crash ("improvements that almost seem like they should be impossible"; source: s-intense-tech-14-lets-appreciate-version-8); 9.1.0's reorganised noise channel (source: s-intense-tech-19-new-noise-and-910-news); and 9.2 with rebuilt sample timing and PHASE modes (source: s-intense-tech-21-whats-new-in-lsdj-92) — the details are on lsdj.

Related#

lsdj · game-boy · intense-tech · defense-mechanism · chipmusic-org · chiptune · lsdpatch · liblsdj

Sources#

s-lsdj-manual · s-intense-tech-13-kotlinski-interview · s-chipmusic-kotlinski-interviews · s-intense-tech-16-cartridge-family · s-intense-tech-20-lsdpatch · s-intense-tech-04-liblsdj · s-intense-tech-12-scoping-out-new-features · s-intense-tech-14-lets-appreciate-version-8 · s-intense-tech-19-new-noise-and-910-news · s-intense-tech-21-whats-new-in-lsdj-92