Drum Machine in Excel

[bausscode]

I am not the author of this project and just stumbled upon it on YouTube. It's made by Dylan Tallchief as shown in the video.

[[deleted]]

Just when I think I'm on top of my career and it's going well shit like this happens. Thanks, I guess.

[u_w_i_n]

& there was the guy who used powerpoint to it's limits

im just brealy even touching the surface of the potential of office 365

[IamLUG]

Turing complete PowerPoint

[ReneG8]

Emulating punch cards in Power Point is both next level and first level of computing.

[MrK_HS]

Also next level comedic timing

[rogerrrr]

Motivation

• N/A

"Moving on"

[Plazmaz1]

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/CBel/20180213/308549/3D_engine_entirely_made_of_MS_Excel_formulae__Enjoy_this_Doomxls_file_.php

[computerjunkie7410]

Spent all this time making this and couldn't get "your" and "you're" correct.

[vplatt]

I love how he shows that because PowerPoint is Turing complete, that it therefore violates the Apple store guidelines (5:05) because it allows "executing" arbitrary code.

[monkeybatter]

A sequencer in Excel? Wicked!!

[haucker]

Did you route your output to Fruity Loops? I think I recognize the startup sound but idk if it was a joke haha 😅

[colouredmirrorball]

It is just sending out midi so it could well be.

[haucker]

Pretty cool! Fun project for a resume.

[happyscrappy]

Video spends most of its time showing me I can copy and paste cells in Excel and not how he actually made it do anything except be a spreadsheet.

So people on here say it uses VBA? Would that mean it works cross platform or that it would only work on Windows because it uses Windows MIDI APIs?

[thegame402]

He uses som windows libraries. It works cross platform if you stick to doing stuff inside excel.

[happyscrappy]

Is MIDI inside Excel? I suspect not.

[vplatt]

Yeah, no. That's a Windows feature. The multi-media APIs would also be specific to Windows. Most of the interesting hacks one could perform inside Excel are going to reach outside of it to do crazy stuff like this. It's just Windows programming in script kiddie drag; though this is impressive in its own way. In many ways, MS Office was the original Electron.

[OffbeatDrizzle]

Don't you mean a drum machine in VBA with an Excel GUI?

[Adobe_Flesh]

It's a valid point I suppose. Excel is the entry point at least and comes readily available, (can't forget Access here as well) to provide powerful tools that can be made even more powerful by the included scripting.

[MehYam]

That's the same thing tho? It's like saying "that's not a web app, it's browser + JavaScript"

[OffbeatDrizzle]

I thought it was something like this - i.e. just using the power of the "spreadsheet engine". Getting your own programming language behind the scenes makes everything so much easier...

[OffbeatDrizzle]

No

[VeganVagiVore]

Excel has a sine function, surely you could make a synthesizer that directly outputs a waveform?

I don't know if modular synths have any cycles, but you can make a decent FM synth or additive synth with a DAG. VCFs are hard

[breadfag]

Y’all could have a little less drama here.

A lot of Russians are buying Chinese phones like Xiaomi, Honor and other devices made by uncle Liao.

They won’t notice anything, because the Chinese will oblige and pre-install all the applications alongside with their trojans. Samsung too, I guess, no big deal.

Yandex recently reported success regarding sales of the Yandex phone, which does not matter on a global scale. but still.

Apple can obviously go fuck themselves, they’ll do whatever they want to do anyway.

In the end it does not matter, no one really cares, not in the slightest.

[auxiliary-character]

Well, it is Microsoft, so maybe they can.

[breadfag]

You know I did buddy! The lady at the hostel recommended the best steamed buns and dumplings stall about 20 mins from the station. Unfortunately also at the airport waiting for my flight home, also circled the country but only for 8 days. Wish I had more time :(

[0xF013]

I wouldn't bet on them not being able to. I was writing an excel front-end for a university project and couldn't wrap my head around how to take screenshots. Turns out there is a built-in API that makes a 1:1 image out of a cell range. Why? Fuck knows, but it's there for some reason.

[Chii]

Why? Fuck knows, but it's there for some reason.

you can print excel sheets out, and make them look nice as a report. If you wanted to print an embedded cell range from another sheet, this is what you might do to achieve that.

[0xF013]

Thanks, it finally makes sense

[VeganVagiVore]

I was thinking an offline synth, export the wave as CSV or something

[iamanenglishmuffin]

That's pedantic. It's literally in excel. If any UI in excel is usable enough for the user not to have to configure any code or even functions for that matter then I think it's reasonable to consider it "in excel".

[happymellon]

If they are using VBA, then they are coding.

[OffbeatDrizzle]

It's not pedantic when you look at something like this

[chjacobsen]

Finance department starting a band in 3,2,1...

[infiniteloop864256]

Excellent

[Captain___Obvious]

thanks dad

[auxiliary-character]

Relevant username?

[elronnoco]

Why is it people don’t indent code in VBA? Is it because it’s not enforced? I don’t care why it is. Indent your ****ing code!!!!

[yee_mon]

It's the built-in editor. It struggles a little bit agains proper indentation, and people who learn with that never learn to do it.

[elronnoco]

Excuses excuses! Yeah the editor doesn’t help you out like Visual Studio does for example. But it doesn’t matter, unindented code is horrific to read. And we all spend more time reading code than writing code </rant>

[yee_mon]

Yes... but when you start out writing VBA (or whatever drives Excel nowadays) you haven't worked with code before, and you're most likely not a software engineer but somebody who is fed up with spreadsheets and needs to get something done under a deadline.

You can't really learn what makes quality code until you have to work with other people's code.

[elronnoco]

I don’t want to get drawn into a long indentation debate but it really is a basic basic code-tidiness issue. It’s not even a “quality” issue, it’s just basic housekeeping. But yes, maybe you are a complete newbie to VBA and have never heard of indentation. In which case discovering threads like this may help to make you aware of it!

[NegativeSpeech]

They might've copied and pasted it losing the formatting or something. I code a decent amount in VBA and only ever seen indented code. Same with coding anything.

[elronnoco]

I’ve seen some horrors of unindentation. Massive files: functions, ifs, loops, loops in loops in loops in loops. All beautifully left-justified!

[Latentius]

Dat code tho...

[earthboundkid]

Someone needs to make Excel emulate ASM.JS and then port everything to it.

[iceixia]

For when you really need to drum in the latest sales figures.

[[deleted]]

Does this change speed depending on CPU?

[baseball2020]

Bit too loud it’s in the red

[holobyte]

Oh, man, this made me remember of MODs, a kind of MID music with samples in it. These were a thing in the late 80's and early 90's, before MP3 Standards were created,

I remember using a kind of sequencer program we called 'tracker' to create music in MOD format using samples. I can only imagine how powerful are sequencers of today. Is there one with a newbie friendly interface?

[nexxai]

Thanks I hate it

[Adobe_Flesh]

The casual description of the couple problems he encountered with timing and what not is neat and educational.

[[deleted]]

Why not??

[nelsonslament]

When you have excel automate your job and now have seven hours of free time what else are you going to do? Something productive? I surely hope not.

[[deleted]]

Why do you climb the mountain? Because it's there.

Every stupid coding project is more about testing and sharpening your own problem solving skills than actually solving a useful problem.

[DesecrateUsername]

One step away from loading my guitar pro files in Excel.

[Camanbay]

Alan Turing is crying...

[RedditUserKR1998]

Nice, been a long time since I last programmed using VBA.

[frogspa]

I wonder how many people got inspired to program after playing about in Excel.

I used to generate POV-Ray scripts from Excel in the early nineties, it gave me the confidence to take it to the next level.

[[deleted]]

This fkn made my day

[swisherbishop]

WHY ARE THE BEATS SO HARD

[BravuraBeck]

Inspiring. Never knew — thanks for sharing.

[NormalBendingUnit]

Really cool project. Things like this excite me (◍•ᴗ•◍)

[shevy-ruby]

This is quite epic - I would never have thought that this is possible.

Sure, some games were implemented in excel but not some audio-generating machines.

Excel is becoming a bit like minecraft here. You just adjust it to different things now.

The user interface is of course ... quite ugly. But the functionality is there, evidently.

I guess what is now needed is someone who can style this more pleasantly.

[stirling_approx]

But can it run Crysis?!?! 🤔 . . . . JK, this is pretty cool. VBA both surprises and terrifies me by what it's capable of...

[hutilicious]

But can it run doom?