Paula

Paula is an easy-to-use object-oriented for playing chiptunes. It gives you a single, simple API to interact with many different chiptune playback libraries.

In its current alpha, Paula includes the following plugins:

• mdxmini, which supports MDX music from the X68000 computer.
• xmp, which supports over 90 classic computer tracker formats.

Usage

Create a player object using a file path and an options hash:

player = Paula('path/to/file', opts)

Supported options:

• :frequency - The playback frequency, in Hz. Mandatory. Currently, specifying a frequency higher than a player's maximum supported frequency raises an exception; this is temporary, until resampling is implemented.
• :loops - The number of times the song should loop before finishing. Defaults to 1.

Generate audio samples using the #next_sample method. This moves the song's position forward, so you can play back music with a simple loop like:

begin
  speakers << player.next_sample
end while not player.complete?

As sugar, player is also enumerable, so you can, e.g.:

player.each {|s| speakers << s}

FAQ

Q: How do I restart a song?

A: Right now, you should restart a song by recreating the player object. A #restart instance method might be added later, which would just be sugar for recreating the object manually.

Q: Can I seek to another position?

A: Right now, no. Rewinding isn't supported, because most chiptune players aren't capable of rewinding the song. Seeking forward just isn't implemented, though you can just call #next_sample until you reach the point you want.

Eventually I may add a buffer option to render all audio ahead of time, which would make seeking backwards possible.

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Make sure you write tests so you know your code works!
4. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
5. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
6. Create new Pull Request