Whatever you did with the instrument makes it sound a little too distorted.

Made it like a pluck.

It still sounds a little bit annoying (at least by itself).

Looks very puzzle-ish

What are you using to make these?

Famitracker.

Ahh. I'll have to look into it. I want more authentic 8-bit sounds, but I've not been fond of the trackers I've tried. I need something that works with music notation, or at least reads midi files.

You'll not get automatic conversion of midi to 8-bit XD
It's just not possible!

For that matter, did you just ask for a tracker that uses standard music notation?

I can work within the limitations of one note per voice if it takes something like that. I've tried a couple of trackers, though, and I couldn't work with it. Trying to make music in a spreadsheet...it's just not how I think. I just don't know what developments they may have had in the several years since I last messed with one.

One can always dream of something that actually involves real music notation.

Well the point of trackers is to give you greater control over the note. Standard musical notation is horribly inefficient.

It depends on what you're trying to do. If you're dealing with a lot of parameters, standard notation is not great for handling various forms of modulation, oscillator control, frequency, resonance...although I don't think it's often it has to be changed at every single note. But if I'm looking at a bunch of numbers on a page...I can't understand it. If I look at a printed score, I can understand multiple instrument parts simultaneously, and how they interact with each other--what is rather efficient, in fact.

But for the greatest control, and thus best sound, you need a tracker.

I think it's still going to depend on what the goal is. I can see using it for preparing something for a game, or for tweaking the sound of something that's written. Actually writing music that way, though...just won't work for me. Having grown up on notation, and having studied it, I don't think of music as a bunch of strings of numbers...trying to do it that way is really cumbersome and slow for me.

As far as fine-tuning sounds with synthesized sound, I've used stuff like Reason to go from midi to something that sounds better. It offers a lot of control when I want it, but if I don't need to change envelopes or filters or whatever mid-song, I don't have to think about those things at all. My difficulty in getting more authentic 8-bit sounds has been in trying to recreate the percussive effects and finding square and triangle wave settings with the right ratio. But, if the only way to get it means a system that I can't really use to compose...it's just not going to work. It'd be like me wanting a good harp sound...the best sound would come from a real harp, but I've never played one, and to do it well, I'd need to practice a lot. I'll just settle for synth or sampler until I can find someone to play a harp for me.

Well the thing is you just plain can't do true 8-bit on anything that's not a tracker.