Little Sound DJ is wonderful tool that transforms your old gameboy into a music making machine. It has a thriving community of users that pushes their old hardware to its limits, in pursuit of new musical endeavours. It can however be cumbersome to manage songs and sounds outside of the gameboy.
In this light liblsdj is being developed, a cross-platform and fast C utility library for interacting with the LSDJ save format (.sav), song files (.lsdsng) and more. The end goal is to deliver liblsdj with a suite of tools for working with everything LSDJ. Currently four such tools are included: lsdsng-export, lsdsng-import, lsdj-mono and lsdj-wavetable-import.
lsdsng-export is a command-line tool for exporting songs from a .sav to .lsdsng, and querying sav formats about their song content.
Options:
-h [ --help ] Help screen
--file arg Input save file, can be a nameless option
--noversion Don't add version numbers to the filename
-f [ --folder ] Put every lsdsng in its own folder
-p [ --print ] Print a list of all songs in the sav
-d [ --decimal ] Use decimal notation for the version number, instead
of hex
-u [ --underscore ] Use an underscore for the special lightning bolt
character, instead of x
-o [ --output ] arg Output folder for the lsdsng's
-v [ --verbose ] Verbose output during export
-i [ --index ] arg Single out a given project index to export, 0 or
more
-n [ --name ] arg Single out a given project by name to export
-w [ --working-memory ] Single out the working-memory song to expor
lsdsng-import is a command-line tool for importing one or more songs from .lsdsng into a .sav file.
Options:
-h [ --help ] Help screen
--file arg .lsdsng file(s), 0 or more
-o [ --output ] arg The output file (.sav)
-s [ --sav ] arg A sav file to append all .lsdsng's to
-v [ --verbose ] Verbose output during import
lsdj-mono is a command-line tool that transforms any .sav, .lsdsngs or folder containing such files to mono. In essence, it changes all OL_ and O_R commands to OLR (leaving O__ untouched), and sets all instruments to play LR as well.
Options:
-h [ --help ] Help screen
--file arg .sav or .lsdng file(s), 0 or more
-v [ --verbose ] Verbose output during import
-i [ --instrument ] Only adjust instruments
-t [ --table ] Only adjust tables
-p [ --phrase ] Only adjust phrases
lsdj-wavetable-import is a command-line tool that imports .snt files (directly containing bytes that represent wavetable data) into your .lsdsng files. A repository of .snt files can be found over at https://github.com/psgcabal/lsdjsynths.
lsdj-wavetable-import [destination] [wavetable] [index]
Options:
-h [ --help ] Help screen
-0 [ --zero ] Pad the wavetable with empty frames if the file < 256
bytes
-f [ --force ] Force writing the frames, even though non-default data
may be in them
-o [ --output ] arg The output .lsdsng to write to
-i [ --index ] The index should be interpreted as a wavetable index
instead of synth
-v [ --verbose ] Verbose output
The nature of liblsdj as a C library makes it compilable on nearly all common OSes. Both tools included have been tested on macOS Sierra and Windows 7/10 and seem to be working. DigiPack has also successfully built liblsdj on Arch Linux.
Precompiled binaries can be found under releases.
If you'd like to help out, let me know. It'd be a great help if more people would test the tools coming with liblsdj. Though I've tagged the first release as 1.0.0, the software is very much still in alpha stage.
Bug reports can be filed in issues. Feature requests can also be added there, appropriately labeled.
Developers that would like to help out are warmly invited to do so. This project is open source for a reason; I know the chiptune scene as a loving and caring, open community, and to me this seems like a good way to give back. I personally have little experience with open sourcing code, and view this as a good opportunity to gain some.
liblsdj and its tools are released under the liberal MIT-license.
Special thanks for Defense Mechanism (urbster1) for thinking along and helping out where needed.
LibLSDJ is open source and freely available to anyone. If you'd like to show your appreciation and help me further developer it, a donation goes a long way.