I've watched a lot of live coding tools out of interest for the last few years, and as much as I'd like to adopt them in my music making it's not clear to me what they can add to my production repertoire compared to the existing tools (DAWs, hardware instruments, playing by hand, etc).
The coding aspect is novel I'll admit, and something an audience may find interesting, but I've yet to hear any examples of live coded music (or even coded music) that I'd actually want to listen to. They almost always take the form of some bog-standard house music or techno, which I don't find that enjoyable.
Additionally, the technique is fun for demonstrating how sound synthesis works (like in the OP article), but anything more complex or nuanced is never explored or attempted. Sequencing a nuanced instrumental part (or multiple) requires a lot of moment-to-moment detail, dynamics, and variation. Something that is tedious to sequence and simply doesn't play to this formats' strengths.
So again, I want to integrate this skill into my music production tool set, but aside from the novelty of coding live, it doesn't appear well-suited to making interesting music in real time. And for offline sequencing there are better, more sophisticated tools, like DAWs or trackers.
Fair point, and that's the challenge in both the software's abilities and the creator's skills.
If you see it as yet another instrument you have to master, then you can go pretty far. I'm finding myself exploring rhythms and sounds in ways I could never do in a DAW so fast, but at the same time I do find limiting a lot of factors, especially sequencing.
So far I haven't gotten beyond a good sounding loop, hence the name "loopmaster", and maybe that's the limit, which is why I made a 2 deck "dual" mode in the editor, so that it can be played as a DJ set where you don't really need that much progression.
That said, it's quite fun to play with it and experiment with sounds, and whenever you make something you enjoy, you can export a certain length and use it as a track in your mix.
My goal is certainly to be able to create full length tracks with nuances and variations as you say, just not entirely sure how to integrate this into the format right now.
The language certainly looks nice! Is it open source? I think it makes sense for this kind of tool, since it's inherently "hackery". I mean people who want to write music with code also probably want the ability to understand and modify any part of the stack, it's the nature of the audience.
Well, maybe it's closer to trance than house. It's also considerably more esoteric and less commented! Win-win?
What‘s going on with all these code-2-music tools these days? See other front page discussion about strudel.cc [1]. Did I enter an established bubble or is there a rising trend? It‘s incredible, though, what people are able to obtain with it, especially when built-up during a live session [2].
Often an article posted to hn will cause a mini-trend as users who are engaging with the subject discover and share more related resources.
Computer music is as old as computers, live coding is pretty old too. (I posted this in the strudel discussion too: https://toplap.org/wiki/HistoricalPerformances) Maybe everyone doing live streams during the pandemic helped get visibility for live coding? It's interesting to see it kind of becoming popular now.
classic overnight success 20 years in the making. many such cases.
I must say the narrated trance piece by switch angel blew me socks right off, to me feels like this should be a genre in itself.
I really want something like this as a VST plugin.
I don't imagine making a full song out of this, but it would be a great instrument to have.
I'm considering a VST version but for now there is an Export Audio feature you can use to get a perfect audio loop to use with Ableton (or any other DAW) with oversampling up to 8x for great quality.
How much do you need in donations to make it happen.
I'll put 50$ down right now.
Click Export Audio next to the title here[0], there is a buymeacoffee button :) tysm
The janky way to do this would be to run it locally, and setup a watch job to reload the audio file into a vst plugin every time the file changes.
The backend now is in WASM. I have a plan on how do this in a VST, I had done a version with a Rust+WASM backend in the past. My main concern is getting a Webview working for the editor, which is custom made, but I think that's also solved by now. The goal would be exactly the Web version working as a VST plugin with its real-time audio engine.
I route midi generated by strudel.cc in to my DAW.
Shoutout to PACE who banned scripting in the JUCE 8 license terms so if you wanted to make this using the leading framework, you can't.
Define scripting.
I'm not going to test it, but couldn't you just load a json file with all params.
Various instructions, etc.
I can't believe it's not code!
If you like this then check out Oxygene pt4 in JS[0].
I've watched a lot of live coding tools out of interest for the last few years, and as much as I'd like to adopt them in my music making it's not clear to me what they can add to my production repertoire compared to the existing tools (DAWs, hardware instruments, playing by hand, etc).
The coding aspect is novel I'll admit, and something an audience may find interesting, but I've yet to hear any examples of live coded music (or even coded music) that I'd actually want to listen to. They almost always take the form of some bog-standard house music or techno, which I don't find that enjoyable.
Additionally, the technique is fun for demonstrating how sound synthesis works (like in the OP article), but anything more complex or nuanced is never explored or attempted. Sequencing a nuanced instrumental part (or multiple) requires a lot of moment-to-moment detail, dynamics, and variation. Something that is tedious to sequence and simply doesn't play to this formats' strengths.
So again, I want to integrate this skill into my music production tool set, but aside from the novelty of coding live, it doesn't appear well-suited to making interesting music in real time. And for offline sequencing there are better, more sophisticated tools, like DAWs or trackers.
Fair point, and that's the challenge in both the software's abilities and the creator's skills.
If you see it as yet another instrument you have to master, then you can go pretty far. I'm finding myself exploring rhythms and sounds in ways I could never do in a DAW so fast, but at the same time I do find limiting a lot of factors, especially sequencing.
So far I haven't gotten beyond a good sounding loop, hence the name "loopmaster", and maybe that's the limit, which is why I made a 2 deck "dual" mode in the editor, so that it can be played as a DJ set where you don't really need that much progression.
That said, it's quite fun to play with it and experiment with sounds, and whenever you make something you enjoy, you can export a certain length and use it as a track in your mix.
My goal is certainly to be able to create full length tracks with nuances and variations as you say, just not entirely sure how to integrate this into the format right now.
Feedback[0] is appreciated!
[0]: https://loopmaster.featurebase.app/
The language certainly looks nice! Is it open source? I think it makes sense for this kind of tool, since it's inherently "hackery". I mean people who want to write music with code also probably want the ability to understand and modify any part of the stack, it's the nature of the audience.
I'll shamelessly plug my weirdo version in a Forth variant, also a house loop running in the browser: https://audiomasher.org/patch/WRZXQH
Well, maybe it's closer to trance than house. It's also considerably more esoteric and less commented! Win-win?
What‘s going on with all these code-2-music tools these days? See other front page discussion about strudel.cc [1]. Did I enter an established bubble or is there a rising trend? It‘s incredible, though, what people are able to obtain with it, especially when built-up during a live session [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46052478 [2] Nice example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GWXCCBsOMSg
Often an article posted to hn will cause a mini-trend as users who are engaging with the subject discover and share more related resources.
Computer music is as old as computers, live coding is pretty old too. (I posted this in the strudel discussion too: https://toplap.org/wiki/HistoricalPerformances) Maybe everyone doing live streams during the pandemic helped get visibility for live coding? It's interesting to see it kind of becoming popular now.
classic overnight success 20 years in the making. many such cases.
I must say the narrated trance piece by switch angel blew me socks right off, to me feels like this should be a genre in itself.
Very cool. https://loopmaster.xyz/generate is super fun also.
Thanks! For anyone trying this, it's being HN crushed right now and hitting rate-limits, you should try again in a bit if you see an error.
Also, there is an AI DJ mode[0] where you set the mood/genre and the AI generates and plays music for you infinitely.
[0]: https://loopmaster.xyz/editor?aidj
I really want something like this as a VST plugin.
I don't imagine making a full song out of this, but it would be a great instrument to have.
I'm considering a VST version but for now there is an Export Audio feature you can use to get a perfect audio loop to use with Ableton (or any other DAW) with oversampling up to 8x for great quality.
How much do you need in donations to make it happen.
I'll put 50$ down right now.
Click Export Audio next to the title here[0], there is a buymeacoffee button :) tysm
[0]: https://loopmaster.xyz/loop/75a00008-2788-44a5-8f82-ae854e87...
I meant for the VST plugin.
The janky way to do this would be to run it locally, and setup a watch job to reload the audio file into a vst plugin every time the file changes.
The backend now is in WASM. I have a plan on how do this in a VST, I had done a version with a Rust+WASM backend in the past. My main concern is getting a Webview working for the editor, which is custom made, but I think that's also solved by now. The goal would be exactly the Web version working as a VST plugin with its real-time audio engine.
I route midi generated by strudel.cc in to my DAW.
Shoutout to PACE who banned scripting in the JUCE 8 license terms so if you wanted to make this using the leading framework, you can't.
Define scripting.
I'm not going to test it, but couldn't you just load a json file with all params.
Various instructions, etc.
I can't believe it's not code!
If you like this then check out Oxygene pt4 in JS[0].
[0] https://dittytoy.net/ditty/59b8a8d54d