We Made the BEST Music Machine in Minecraft

Oh my God yo this is crazy what the hell wow that’s really small oh my God this is insane several months ago I posted a video titled I made a mini machine in Minecraft in which I showcased a simple one octave midi-like machine and played

A simple song on it I was pretty proud of it and people seemed to like it and I just moved on to the next video Huh well all right Moon catcher let’s see what you got needless to say we hopped on a call and he showed me his design pretty cool stuff but then he had another idea you know how in 1.19.4 jukeboxes will be able to interact with hoppers right and jukebox has already output a

Different signal based on the disc inside yes what if we use this new mechanic to create a more compact music player interesting you want to work on this together Sure why not I had no idea what I just signed up for oh my God Forgot to tell you I’m running this on a quantum computer so where do we even begin well first what is this new Jukebox tech to be clear jukeboxes were already able to Output a signal strength based on the disk inside of it but inserting and removing the discs had to be done

Manually until now starting in 1.19.4 Hoppers are able to both insert and remove disks from jukeboxes this means that if we feed a stream of discs through a jukebox and capture the signal strength of each disk we can read it as if it was a stream of data and what’s

Better each of these bits of data can have one of 15 different states making the data very detailed couple that with the power of shulker boxes and now you can store an ordered list of 27 bits of information in just one inventory slot and then put those into a double chest

And you have an insane 1458 ordered bits of information in just one inventory see where I’m going with this so in order to encode a song we need a way to represent notes and rests for rests that’s easy we just use any non-stackable item that can’t be

Inserted into a jukebox we decided on shuffles for that for notes that’s a bit more involved so there’s 15 different music discs that output a signal strength of 1 through 15. so if we assign notes to each disk we can encode a specific order of notes inside of a

Shulker box but there’s one problem with that the note block only has two octaves of range for a total of 25 notes 15 is not going to cut it unless of course we split the range in half and build two machines one for the lower octave and

One for the upper octave that way we can use only the 12 farmable disks to make this at least somewhat survival friendly and also pick step for the highest F sharp but we don’t mention that one so with this amazing plan all we need is two jukeboxes to cover the full range of

One instrument or do we you see there’s one fatal flaw with this approach Hoppers are painfully slow they transfer items once every four Redstone ticks or 0.4 seconds and though this may be fast enough for your storage system it sounds like this when you try to play a song Yeah that was megalovania if you couldn’t tell we can’t build this amazing machine only to be stuck with that so is there a way to speed this up well yes there is enter the hopper Minecart this baby can transfer items so fast once every game tick to be exact

That’s four times faster than a regular Hopper so what we can do is place a hopper Minecart right under our input chest and then split the stream into two separate Hopper lines offset by two Redstone ticks to achieve Maximum Overdrive I mean double Hopper speed and now megalovania sounds like this

It’s still kinda slow but literally twice as fast it’ll do so now we build that mechanism attach a red coder to decode the current disk and it doesn’t work it turns out that this Redstone line blinks too fast for our traditional red-coater design basically if a torch blinks too fast for too long

It burns out so now what guess we have to design a brand new red coater that can handle fast pulses without torches that can’t be too hard right right well it works I’m I mean yeah but it’s huge yeah there’s gotta be a way to make it

Smaller I mean that’d be nice after all who wants each Octave of each instrument to look like freaking stadium seating such a giant thing sticking out of our module really takes away from the magic of it all and not to mention that it wouldn’t allow you to be in hearing

Range of a lot of instruments evidently it bothered mooncatcher too because just a couple days later I received this my word he’s done it now we’re able to play a song but you see this is only half the magic I mean you don’t play a CD only to just

Throw it away after right I mean you want to get it back so how do we return the song Back to the player well we’ve simply merged the two Hopper lines into the same dropper and then use a two tick clock to insert the items back into the

Shulkers at Double Hopper speed it’s quite simple really it really wasn’t but I won’t bore you with the details so with the song successfully packed into shulker boxes and our egos sufficiently inflated we were done we finally had a machine to play back a full length

Encoded song and even pack it all back into shulker boxes afterwards so what’s next I am so glad you asked paste the machine all around a central location hook them up with instant line and play a song of course let’s listen to our masterpiece all right hit it let’s go Okay oh um oh my computer is not liking this wait what oh no dude I I think I found it take a look at this what’s happening oh oh my God nothing is as easy as it seems you see we thought we had created the perfect machine but Minecraft had other plans

Y’all ever heard of locationality it’s a word that can make any Redstone or shudder if you’ve dealt with it you know the nightmare never ends for my condolences for your quality of sleep but for those of you who aren’t aware let me introduce you locationality is basically when the same Contraption or

Components behave differently based on where they are located in the world yes this is a real thing this can affect basically any Redstone component but none is more vulnerable than the hopper did I say vulnerable I meant buggy you see Hoppers are supposed to transfer items on a global clock and in some

Locations they do but in others they just don’t this makes anything involving item transfer with precise timings and absolute headache to work with and guess what that’s exactly what we’re doing here but we can fix it it’s what we do we always fix it foreign

Debugging whether we like it or not is a central part of the Redstone process often when we’re working with anything complex this is the part that takes up the most time no dude oh no no it’s not working it’s not working there’s no there’s no shulker box it’s not glamorous and it’s

Full of ups and downs but we persevere oh okay no no that doesn’t sound good oh God you feel like you’re stuck in a never-ending cycle but we press on yeah yeah that’s wrong it doesn’t work no yeah dude this is this is not gonna work yeah but

Sometimes even when you’ve done all of that there’s no guarantee that you’ll achieve the Perfection that you’re after and as the months pass and you run out of ideas reality is there waiting is there anything else we can do no no I don’t think so but at this point we were five months

Into this project and we wouldn’t give up that easily so we landed on an iteration that is good enough and decided to ship it anyway the true engineer’s way let’s try this again you ready yep all right let’s go dude I think is it it’s working yes it’s totally working let’s go let’s go Thank you All right let’s show this thing off shall we but not in this stage so mooncatcher got busy with the beautiful decorations while I worked on a script to convert NBS songs into a schematic that we can easily paste into our machine shout out to the openmbs team

For creating a python library to parse NBS songs and shout out to fellow creators loymay for creating the MC schematic python Library couldn’t have done it without you this code is available on GitHub by the way so you can try it out just be aware that it’s not all that professional I

Mean I threw most of this together on a plane so with the decorations finished and several songs locked and loaded it’s time to flex on some YouTubers let’s go Wait what is this wait September or something that’s right yeah now that’s the Jazzy thing I want to see you know is this like fully encodable can you put like anything into this oh yeah oh my god oh shoot wait the piano takes more than one wall okay this

Has to be like a midi converter or something this is a brilliantly planned project you knew exactly how this was going to look in the end and brilliantly executed so cool who needs to make no block songs anymore when you have this thing this is one of the coolest machines that I’ve

Ever seen in my entire life we do want to show you one more song though although I’m still gonna get Rick Rolled that’s exactly what’s gonna happen right now ready yes no wait hold on oh no I knew it no this is a fantastic second song bro bro no Foreign