by cutting out middlemen you're cutting out gatekeepers who pre-chew the content for users who don't want to wade through a sea of shit to find something that'll interest them.

Actually it sounds like they're not cutting out that part. From the FAQ on Kickstarter:

As with every platform, though, we have to balance openness with a quality user experience. So we'll have a standard user interface. We'll curate your games in our storefront so they're easy for everyone to get to. And we’ll require that all games we put in our store include a free experience. If you don’t like our choices, root the device and make it your own.

free to play games are generally always bad. a console with exclusively free to play games? no thanks.

Free-to-play is also my biggest complaint with the console. However, their kickstarter FAQ makes it clear that having a free demo for a full game counts as free-to-play by their rules, which is basically a good thing to do anyway. So I'm not as concerned about that now.

This kickstarter has reached a million dollars in half a day, with 29.5 more days to go. Clearly this idea matters to people, and if it's not a runaway success when it's launched then all these people who care about it will keep pushing it until it's a success. If you don't like it, you don't have to develop for it, but there's not much point in being skeptical now.

The developer-friendly attitude is the thing that excites me most about it right now.

I'm not convinced that this same animation wouldn't look better with higher fidelity and anti-aliasing. However, I am definitely convinced that it looks beautiful either way and you are a fantastic 3D artist/animator/designer.

class Person extends Flammable

Hi Will! And welcome to TIGSource, Mr PIGSquad no-association-to-PIGScene. I'm happy to see you're enjoying Beep Box.

I'm quietly making a lot of progress on Beep Box and will release a major update before the competition starts. Upcoming features include:

• custom song durations, for those who aren't satisfied with 16 bars.
• pitch bends, good for imitating vocals, bass drums, or just getting freaky.
• volume envelopes to let notes fade in and out.
• octave scroll bars if you don't like the default pitch range.
• polish features like copying+pasting patterns, transposing notes, bugfixes etc.

Meanwhile the interface is just as simple as it was before, so you should be able to discover the new features at your own pace.

Will's music is a source of inspiration for me, and I can't wait to see what else people can make with Beep Box.

That's a pretty awesome question!

So I'm playing around with an LFO and a sine wave oscillator right now. The LFO modulates the volume of the sine wave with a repeating pulse that looks kind of like this:

/\____

So that's a burst of energy, followed by a period of silence, representing the buildup and release of tension as tiny connections in the fabric snap. This LFO repeats very quickly, like maybe 20 Hz or so. Meanwhile the underlying sine wave rises in pitch gradually. After five or so seconds I end the recording, and then I apply an envelope to fade in the recording at the beginning and fade out at the end.

Then I take this sound effect, and mix it in with several copies of itself with a delay between each so that they're not synchronized. I can keep fading in more copies as others fade out to prolong the sound of stretching.

It would take some tweaking to get it to sound like whatever material you're going for but I like it and would be happy to share my results if you're having trouble reproducing it.

Hi again guys! I've added new instrument features to Beep Box! Also, I've released the source code, so grab the synth package to play Beep Box songs in your own Flash games.

Song: "5 AM"

Thanks for the encouraging feedback guys. 

I am not musically gifted, so this tool is my way of learning how to make music. i.e. instead of getting better at making music, I'm just trying to make it easier on myself.

I'm strange. 

Seems to be a bug-- When you open a song url, the song starts playing, but you don't actually hear the first half-second.

Yeah, noted. I'm focusing on other stuff right now but fixing that is on my to-do list.

Oh, and do you have any plans to release the playback engine source? This would be fun to use in games

I'm working on it! Gonna release the source soonish.

Secret Of Wazulu

Haha, that's so final boss.

why not

Oh man I love the echo effect here...

Badass. 

Oh excellent! I'm happy that you're having fun with it.

I have plans for supporting finer control over volume and pitch. For now, the interface only gives you a little control over it, but the data format already supports more complicated tones. Here's a sneak peak...

Nice, this will be helpful!

Check this out. Good or bad?

Yeah, you got the idea. Looks like you've figured out how to assign pattern numbers and adjust the loop duration. My only critique so far is the last note of yellow pattern number two.

You can adjust the duration of a note by dragging horizontally.

Hello again tiggers! I've been working on a chiptune sketching tool called Beep Box. It's definitely a work in progress, but it's at a point where I am comfortable sharing it, and it's already been used for a game! My girlfriend made this song for our Global Game Jam game in it.

Some more examples:
Kraid's song from Metroid
the first song I made in it

As you edit the song, the URL changes too. The URL *is* the song, so if you share the URL, when someone else clicks on it, the song is reconstructed from the URL.

Let me know if you make anything cool or if you have any feedback!