Alternatives
Products that do what Am-1 Arpeggio Machine – A Love Letter to Berlin School Music does
I have been entranced by Berlin School music for years. I love those evolving and interwoven arpeggios. Latching an arp is often my favorite way to noodle on a synth, and yes it’s because I can’t play to save my life. Last month I got tired of waiting for someone else to build my dream arp machine, so I built my own in the form of a web synth. It is purpose-built for sculpting and performing with melodies. I call it the AM-1 Arpeggio Machine. My next goal is to port the web engine into hardware format (using the Daisy Seed). But in the meantime, since the web app is perfectly usable, I…
- 1HHaxophone▲526
I built this during Covid. When I released it, some of the parts went out of stock or skyrocketed in price, no longer making this an economic DIY project. Now that things are getting back to almost normal, I thought I'd share it here and request feedback. This is a very niche project for people who like the same things I do: saxophones, Rust, mechanical keyboards and the Raspberry Pi.
2022 · github.com
- 2IB
Originally started as a project to restore patterns from now defunct website 808.pixll.de just for myself, but eventually i decided to share it with others. I've seen this website mentioned a couple of times on HN:) Currently it only supports Roland TR-808, but there will be more.
2025 · drumpatterns.onether.com
- 3IU
Hi Hacker News, This is definitely out of my comfort zone. I just wanted to show you guys because I'm super proud of it. It's a 100% faithful recreation based off of the schematics, patents, and ROMs that were found online. So please watch the video and tell me what you think https://youtu.be/auOlZXI1VxA The reason why I think this is relevant is because I've been a programmer for 25 years and AI scares the shit out of me. I'm not a programmer anymore. I'm something else now. I don't know what it is but it's multi-disciplinary, and it doesn't involve writing code myself--for…
Jan 2026
- 4
- 5WA
Hi, I'm the author of this little Web Audio toy which does physical modeling synthesis using a simple spring-mass system. My current area of research is in sparse, event-based encodings of musical audio (https://blog.cochlea.xyz/sparse-interpretable-audio-codec-pa...). I'm very interested in decomposing audio signals into a description of the "system" (e.g., room, instrument, vocal tract, etc.) and a sparse "control signal" which describes how and when energy is injected into that system. This toy was a great way to start learning about physical modeling synthesis, which seems…
2025 · blog.cochlea.xyz
- 6BA
Hello all! I've been an avid fan of Pocket Operators by Teenage Engineering since I found out about them. I even own an EP-133 K.O. II today, which I love. A couple of months ago, Reddit user andiam03 shared a Google Sheet with some drum patterns [1]. I thought it was a very cool way to share and understand beats. During the weekend I coded a basic version of this app I am sharing today. I iterated over it in my free time, and yesterday I felt like I had a pretty good version to share with y'all. It's not meant to be a sequencer but rather a way to experiment with beats and basic sounds,…
Jan 2026 · beats.lasagna.pizza
- 7IB
Hey HN, I’m an ex-Google engineer trying to get back into music production. I needed a way to sequence my hardware synths using AI contexts without constantly switching windows, so I built this. It runs entirely in the browser using WebMIDI. No login required. It connects to your local MIDI devices (if you're on Chrome/Edge) and lets you generate patterns. Tech stack: [React / WebMIDI API / etc]. Link: www.simplychris.ai/droplets Code is a bit messy, but it works. Feedback welcome.
Dec 2025 · simplychris.ai
- 8ALAbleton Live MCP▲123
Ever wanted to control Ableton with just your voice? Me too! I made this MCP server so I could just ask Codex to do anything in Ableton Live for me, while I was nap-trapped by my baby. The chat messages I sent to Codex to make this: in ableton, make a self reflective song, with audio vocals (via macos say) and chip tunes and 80's drum machines. should be a real edm banger i want midi for everything but vocals please, with ableton devices. not prerendered audio for instruments needs some fills and should hit way harder after "3-2-1 i become the sound" the vocals are squished too much (read…
May 2026 · github.com
- 9WI
I built k-synth as an experiment to see if a minimalist, K-inspired array language could make sketching waveforms faster and more intuitive than traditional code. I’ve put together a web-based toolkit so you can try the syntax directly in the browser without having to touch a compiler: Live Toolkit: https://octetta.github.io/k-synth/ If you visit the page, here is a quick path to an audio payoff: - Click "patches" and choose dm-bell.ks. - Click "run"—the notebook area will update. Click the waveform to hear the result. - Click the "->0" button below the waveform to copy…
Mar 2026 · octetta.github.io
- 10IJ
Hey all. For the last few years, I have been developing a software synthesizer as a side project. It's taken longer than I both hoped and feared, but earlier this week I finally shipped 1.0. Details about the synth itself are up on my website, https://lhiaudio.com/. For those who are unfamiliar, in music production, there are host applications (such as Logic Pro, Ableton Live, or REAPER) in which most of the work (such as recording or sequencing MIDI data) is done. These applications generally have some built-in tools for the actual generation and processing of audio data, but…
2018
- 11IB
Hey HN! Last week I was working on a website and needed a way to synchronise visuals with live music. I've used MIDI controllers for this before, but I am travelling right now and don't have mine with me. So I had the crazy idea to build a browser extension that uses the keyboard as input and includes a sequencer. I gave myself 24 to work on it. It ended up taking longer (of course), specially since I ended up creating a demo, a small landing, docs, and an intro video. Took me one week from idea to launch (pushed quite a bit tbh). Features: - Works as a browser extension. Atm distributed…
2024 · minitap.io
- 12IB
The HN community may find the context of the prompts, organized by each turn in each session, the most useful. See the website/docs/prompts.md and session-X.md files. I also started exploring some workflows for the LLM to execute, organized in the website/docs/tasks/ folder. I found it pretty handy to have the LLM document our work as we went and simply embedded the static site into the executable, along with all the music and logic. The whole project took me about a day for the backend. The C++ controller itself took only a few turns. I enjoyed focusing on my son's…
2025 · github.com
- 13MN
Hello HN! It seems there has been an influx of MIDI projects as of late. I myself also got inspired to work on one last January. I had become frustrated in not being able to read my old sheet music without counting the notes mentally. I thought there had to be an easier way to learn them, I surveyd some apps but none of them felt right to me. So I decided to build one myself and learn some music theory too. I'm quite happy how it turned out, in the end. My sheet-reading has improved substantially although playing and remembering notes is two different things. It works best if you use MIDI…
2024 · midi-note-trainer.teemukoivisto.xyz
- 14PA
Hey everyone, I've built a multiplayer audio recorder/looper for songwriting in your browser. It started as a side project in March last year but 3 months ago I quit my job to work on it full-time. I wanted the simplicity of a Portastudio and the utility of a loop station to serve as an easy way to get song ideas together without needing to send files back and forth, or get lost in the complexity of traditional DAWs up front - just record or upload your ideas and share the link with whoever you want to collaborate with. Would love to hear what you think of it! Any feedback, thoughts, or…
2023 · prototape.fm
- 15WD
I know mentioning Michael Seibel is almost cheating, but this week he demonstrated the "leaky pipes" concept to me. Not that I know the guy, but in one of his videos he says something on the lines of "If you are unsure if you app is ready to be launched, just launch it. It's like a house with leaky pipes, just open the main, grab your tools, and start fixing wherever water is leaking". So we did it, we launched drummy earlier this week on /r/InternetIsBeautiful and we got very close to 10k users in just one day! Survived the hug of death, learned a ton, and made changes all around.…
2022 · drummy.io
- 16IV
Hi - I'm part composer, part engineer and big fan of reading blogs where people learn out loud or with the garage door up by sharing their notebooks or journals. I've been doing this in Moleskines for years (going back to the 80s) but made it a new year's in 2024 resolution to post SOMETHING everyday, so long as I created the sound. I have a big archive of demos and seeds of ideas, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to do something with those in the process. Being so steeped in programming for the last 30 years, a healty chunk of this material is made via coding with Csound, TidalCycles, some raw…
2025 · listenfaster.com
- 17IV
So, I've never written a line of Rust in my life. I wouldn't know an `&mut this` from a mutandis. But I saw a tweet about a month ago that said, in this new era of AI, you'd be able to just take a library that you love, throw a TUI around it, and call it an app. So I spent about 200 bucks last month, here's what I came up with: Imbolc is a DAW that runs entirely in your terminal. It talks to scsynth over OSC and ships 58 instruments and 39 effects. VSTs are a work in progress, also GarageBand loops if you want to recreate "Umbrella". The codebase is about 60k? lines of Rust across 5 crates,…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 18PP
Write up of an embedded project I made to control my analogue synthesizer. Happy to answer any questions or provide any further details of this project if wanted.
2024 · doug.lon.dev
- 19BB
Inspired by the recent Boards Of Canada announcement, I've been in a low-fi electronica mood lately and was going back and forth with Claude on how to design similar instruments in the browser that fit the genre. One thing led to another and pretty soon I had a fully browser based polyphonic synthesizer / drum machine / sequencer. The interface and workflow was heavily inspired by the Rebirth338 application released back in the 90's, but with lo-fi synth voices rather than the original 303 & 808 emulation. I know there's a significant overlap of developers and musicians and I…
May 2026 · github.com
- 20AA
Hey y'all, So - the main idea of this is to make a WebAudio synthesis/sequencer tool which humans can use via the UI, but where the big unlock is for agents to drive with MCP It's semi decent as "make a groovy jazz track", especially for retro sounds - but the real use case is more like "make a jetpack whoosh effect I can control via code at runtime - where the sound changes based on character health or how much fuel is left" In other words, the target audience is not musicians (except maybe of the Max/MSP sort), but more like creative coders who want to shape the sound iteratively…
Jun 2026 · audio.awsm.fun
- 21IC
Hi HN! I've been tinkering on a programmatically controlled typewriter. I've got a working prototype and it's been a lot of fun to play with. Of course I connected it to ChatGPT so I can chat with it, and I also have it acting as a clock, but it doesn't just type out the time. It writes a poem about the time. I'm posting this to gauge interest in purchasing one. It's all handmade, so I can't scale it up, but if enough people are into it, I might make a small batch. Or maybe sell it as a kit for the DIY crowd. Anyway, just wanted to put it out there and see what you all think. Thanks for…
2024 · notes.bayesup.date
- 22OM
Have been making music using ML/AI tools for about as long as I've been on HN. Had a recent comment section on HN here [1] and after that thought it might be worthwhile to write out about the journey in greater detail... from crude LSTM models, to hacking around with Jukebox, and now Suno. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45388822
Dec 2025 · songxytr.substack.com
- 23
This toy retro synth installs and runs on esp32-s3 or p4 as an ELF file under BreezyBox firmware. It uses my work-in-progress immediate mode TUI library in C. Web-based version via emscripten: https://mini000.itch.io/beeper Source code: https://github.com/valdanylchuk/beeper Demo video running on Tanmatsu (esp32-p4): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCH9XYZ7QB0 The main challenge I was going for was actually to find a nice minimal set of controls for a subtractive synth. Usually there are 40-50 of them in "simple" synths; I ended up with 16.…
Jul 2026 · mini000.itch.io
- 24IM
Hey everyone, I built a Sonic Pi MCP to create music with just prompts and jam with Claude I've linked a demo of me asking Claude for a rock beat, and then for some D minor chords that sound like Pink Floyd Let me know what you think!
2025 · twitter.com
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