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4champ

4champ is an app that provides a mobile interface to Amiga Music Preservation database on iOS devices.

Many of us who grew up with computers in the 80's and early 90's remember Amiga and particularly its mind-blowing audio capabilities which were unrivaled at the era. Amiga inspired a lot of musicians to produce a vast amount of compositions, or modules as they were called. Amiga Music Preservation is a non-profit project that collects anything related to Amiga music production. AMP database boasts over 150 000 modules, 4champ app is your direct access to all that goodness.

Development journal

In this repository I'm working on rewriting the app that originally was released in AppStore in 2012. It was available in the store until late 2017, when I decided to remove the app from there as I could not release updates any more due to missing third party content license.

In early 2020 I have set up a Sole Proprietor developer account in App Store and the third party content licensing issue has been resolved. The app is now in back in the AppStore, you can download it at https://apps.apple.com/app/4champ/id578311010.

If you're interested to test new features when they're getting implemented before official App Store releases, you can join the beta program at https://testflight.apple.com/join/j1yhaJQ1.

You can read more about the history of the app and follow the rewrite process on the development journal that I created for this project: sitomani.github.io/4champ.

You can also follow the @4champ_app Twitter account to stay up to date on what's happening with the app.

Main Features and their current status in this repository

  • Radio: You can listen to a random set of tunes from the whole collection of over 150000 modules, or stream from the head, i.e. the most recently added ones. You can also play from the local collection from set of modules that you've selected to keep for offline mode. This was implemented first in the rewrite.
  • Search (search the AMP database by module, composer, group name or sampletexts): Implemented in October 2018.
  • Playlists (build your own playlists): Playlists implemented in April 2020.
  • Local Collection (store modules locally): Persistent storage for off-line listening of modules implemented June 2019.
  • Settings (control stereo separation etc): Stereo separation setting implemented in November 2018.

Dependencies

A. Carthage

4champ is built with a number of dependencies. Part of them are configured through a Cartfile, so you will need to have Carthage installed to prepare these.

B. Frameworks configured in Cartfile

Alamofire is used for network comms. GzipSwift is used to unpack the gzipped module files. SwiftyBeaver is used for logging.

To build these, run carthage bootstrap --platform iOS in the root folder of the project.

C. Module Playback Libraries

4champ uses libOpenMPT and Hivelytracker for module playback.

Hivelytracker replayer code is included in 4champ/Replay/Hively folder, so it will be built automatically when you build xcode projects in this repository, no further actions needed.

LibOpenMPT repo does not build for iOS without small tweaks, which I have done on my own fork of the lib at https://github.com/sitomani/openmpt. In order to build it for use in connection with 4champ and the SamplePlayer demo app in this repository, you will need to take the following steps:

  1. Make sure you have the GENie project generator tool installed to your system
  2. Clone https://github.com/sitomani/openmpt at same folder where you cloned this repository at (the repositories will be subfolders in same level in the directory tree).
  3. Navigate in terminal to the openmpt repository root folder
  4. Execute iOS_genproject.sh to generate the xcode project files for libopenmpt.
  5. Execute iOS_build.sh to build the fat lib file for iOS use (both X86_64 and ARM64 slices combined).
  6. After successful build, the library file liblibopenmpt.a will be found under openmpt repository root, and 4champ repository projects are configured to find it there, provided that you have cloned this repository and openmpt repository in the same folder.

Building the app

After setting up the dependencies you can open 4champ.xcodeproj in Xcode and build the application. On simulator you can run the app without any further changes.

In order to run the app on device, you will need to replace the bundle identifier with another id, because Xcode will create a development certificate on the fly for the device build and same bundle identifier cannot be present in multiple certificates.

The Xcode generated developer certificate will only be valid for 7 days, which means that you'll need to reinstall from Xcode every week to use the app. To work around this nuisance, you can create an ad hoc distribution certificate for signing the app in Apple Developer Center if you are a member of the Apple Developer Program.

License

The code in this repository is copyright © Aleksi Sitomaniemi and licensed under MIT license, except for HivelyTracker replay routine code which is by licenced under BSD-3 by Pete Gordon.

Module files included under SamplePlayer test project that I've used to verify the the replay routine are work of the original authors:

1st_intro.mod by florist (Aleksi Sitomaniemi - yup that's me!)
all.in.eightchannels.xm by Daze (Patrick Glasby-Baldwin)
mislead.ahx by Pink (Manfred Linzner)
peanuts!.hvl by Lavaburn (Dale Whinham)