Discuss Scratch

---signus
Scratcher
22 posts

Music on scratch?

I'm wondering, is it easy to make music on scratch, I know that they have instruments on the website you can use. But if you've ever done it what's your experience with it?
---signus
Scratcher
22 posts

Music on scratch?

Personally I use FL studio, but those sound good.
Voxalice
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Music on scratch?

Having made music on Scratch before, I wouldn't say it's easy, but it becomes tolerable once you figure out how to program the music.
Still, it takes a lot more effort to make something nice-sounding than it would in a regular DAW.

The music blocks are also quite janky and will often go out-of-sync, so you have to program each measure of the song separately and play them back-to-back.
Even then, unless you turn on Turbo Mode or use TurboWarp, the song will still have awkward pauses in it, especially if things are moving on-screen.

Honestly, there are only four situations where I would recommend using the music blocks:
  1. You need to generate small sound effects

  2. Regular music would be too large to fit in the project

  3. You want an interesting programming challenge

  4. You're working with someone else's code that happens to use music blocks already
In most other situations, just using a DAW is so much better in every way.

I think the description of “A CYBER'S WORLD? in note blocks” sums it up well:

CoolGuyStuff wrote:

It had been a while since I had used Scratch's note blocks, and that's because, well, they're kind of terrible for making music. Rather than letting that dissuade me from trying, I decided to take that as a challenge and try my hand at it again anyway.

I was pleasantly surprised by the result (which isn't saying much, considering my expectations weren't very high). It sounds decently close to the original song, and there isn't a single audio file in the project! The biggest problem is how the different instrument tracks tend to lag and go out of sync. I programmed a complicated workaround to prevent this from happening, which helped a lot, but unfortunately the problem can't be avoided entirely. With this experiment out of the way, I will now proceed to never use note blocks ever again.
---signus
Scratcher
22 posts

Music on scratch?

I personally won't use note blocks either, the first time I tried to it ended up coming out horribly.

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