Alternatives
Products that do what I used AI to recreate a $4000 piece of audio hardware as a plugin does
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…
- 1IT
Hey HN! I just shipped a project I’ve been working on called Maroofy: https://maroofy.com You can search for any song, and it’ll use the song’s audio to find other similar-sounding music. Demo: https://twitter.com/subby_tech/status/1621293770779287554 How does it work? I’ve indexed ~120M+ songs from the iTunes catalog with a custom AI audio model that I built for understanding music. My model analyzes raw music audio as input and produces embedding vectors as output. I then store the embedding vectors for all songs into a vector database, and use semantic…
2023 · maroofy.com
- 2
- 3AA
This is an web audio experiment I've been wanting to do for a long time. Basically an ambient music composition, but all the sound elements are laid out in space, and that musical space can be explored freely. It's definitely inspired by in-world music that sometimes appears in games. I basically took that concept, keeping the music aspect, and dropping the entire "game" aspect. I also turned it into a more "traditional" non-interactive album, but since I started with code, why not program the whole thing? Had a blast making the entire album from code, the complete source for the album is…
2024 · ambient.garden
- 4IO
Hi HN! Last year the project I launched here got a lot of good feedback on creating speech to speech AI on the ESP32. Recently I revamped the whole stack, iterated on that feedback and made our project fully open-source—all of the client, hardware, firmware code. This Github repo turns an ESP32-S3 into a realtime AI speech companion using the OpenAI Realtime API, Arduino WebSockets, Deno Edge Functions, and a full-stack web interface. You can talk to your own custom AI character, and it responds instantly. I couldn't find a resource that helped set up a reliable, secure websocket (WSS) AI…
2025 · github.com
- 5MA
I am excited to announce a new tool for music producers and audio enthusiasts - a music audio search engine. With just a simple description of the groove you're looking for, our semantic search engine will output the most similar audio in seconds. I used the Freesound.org API to upload over 3,000 grooves to MongoDB, and combined all the relevant data such as tags, title, description, BPM, etc. into OpenAI's Text-Davinci to generate a unique description of each sound. I then embedded these descriptions using the Ada Embeddings Model and inserted them into Pinecone DB vector database, making…
2023 · muzic-sage.vercel.app
- 6IJ
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
- 7OM
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
- 8IP
Hi HN, I’m Ashu, founder of VideoDB. I’ve spent a big chunk of my life building video infrastructure. Not video creation. Video plumbing. The stuff you only learn after production breaks: timebases, VFR, keyframes, audio sync drift, container quirks, partial uploads, live streams, retries, backpressure, codecs, ffmpeg flags, cost blowups, and “why is this clip unseekable on one player but fine on another”. This week we shared VideoDB Skills, a skill pack that lets AI agents call those infra primitives directly, instead of you wiring pipelines with screenshots plus FFmpeg glue. Repo:…
Mar 2026
- 901
Hey HN! I've been working on a side project to create an audio transcription API based on the OpenAI whisper model. Sign up link: https://whisperapi.com I tried to make the API really easy to use and get setup with. Also, because the Whisper model is so good, turns out I can offer the service for about 75% cheaper than what seems like the industry average. I'm always looking to make improvements, so would appreciate any feedback anyone has!
2022 · whisperapi.com
- 10CC
Hey there HN! I believe the future of AI communication will be more voice and less text. Low-latency realistic voice interactions are finally becoming feasible. I've built a few voice-first apps on Retell AI using Elevenlabs voices. This one uses Claude Haiku for responses and Mixtral to switch between posts and comments. The AI knows about the top 30 posts and their comments on Hacker News right now. After a Google sign-in you can try it free for 10 minutes. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
2024 · callhackernews.com
- 11UA
I was tired of finding videos with sound effects , extracting the audio then extracting the audio I want. So I made AI get to work for me :)
2024 · image-effects.com
- 12AA
We’re a group of electronic music artists and PhD researchers working in AI music. We've been working on a project to help us discover new music in a more objective way. It's called Speak Music: https://speakmusic.sonophase.com/ We’ve trained an AI model to understand the correspondence between music and language. The model combines a machine listening and audio signal processing with transformers for text embeddings. Once trained, we index a huge catalogue of unseen audio, ensuring that the search system can efficiently scale to millions of tracks. At the moment, our model is…
2023 · speakmusic.sonophase.com
- 13IB
Hi Hackernews Community, Have long been a fan of yours. Waited long to perfect my video/audio translation product as a solopreneur. Now, we have a testable product with 10,000+ monthly users. We are not perfect yet but we provide a ton of features. We provide AI-generated subtitles. We let the user edit the subtitles and timestamps. User can edit the translated audio/video unlimited times without additional fees. We are in the process of making voice cloning free for all users, hopefully completing this weekend. We are launching a chrome extension and mobile app too. Though we…
2024 · videodubber.ai
- 14IV
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
- 15V
Hello HN! I’m a bachelors student pursuing Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Signal processing and during the year I had the goal to build my first AI Tool and launch it. I got inspired by how capable Whisper is, and combined the Whisper CPP Bindings along with FFMPEG.Wasm to create a tool that is capable of transcribing and captioning video files that contain one or more video tracks. Along with that, I’ve also added the support for transcribing audio files with the option to export those outputs as .SRT, .WebVTT or simply a text file. All done privately on a user’s web browser with…
2023
- 16
- 17WO
We kept hitting the same wall building voice AI systems. Pipecat and LiveKit are great projects, genuinely. But getting it to production took us weeks of plumbing - wiring things together, handling barge-ins, setting up telephony, Knowledge base, tool calls, handling barge in etc. And every time we needed to tweak agent behavior, you were back in the code and redeploying. We just wanted to change a prompt and test it in 30 seconds. Thats why Vapi retell etc exist. So we wrote the entire code and open sourced it as a Visual drag-and-drop for voice agents ( same as vapi or n8n for voice).…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 18AA
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
- 19MV
I went nuts on Sunday after stumbling on this animator script for the automatic branch: https://github.com/Animator-Anon/Animator And then it's a ton of keyframing. I also found that the timings all have to be earlier than the timestamp you want to account for how long it takes to denoise to your new scene - so like .4 gives smoother but longer, .7 is snappy. To get stuff to keep showing up and stay dynamic you can zoom out continuously, it needs a UI, badly. If you're on windows you'll need ffmpeg too. I watched this when it came out last week:…
2022 · old.reddit.com
- 20OA
Hey Hacker News, I'm Nir, cofounder of Oboe (https://oboe.fyi), which we just launched publicly. Oboe lets anyone create a course out of a single prompt to learn about any topic. We're on a mission to democratize learning. We envision a future in which AI feeds us, making us smarter, and reignites the love of learning we all seem to have lost. Each course enables a variety of learning formats, letting you learn how you want, when you want. From deep dive articles to podcasts to games to quizzes. We want courses to feel lightweight and accessible, and to encourage following rabbit…
Sep 2025
- 21SS
Hola HN! Long time lurker, sometimes commentor, first time poster here. I’ve been working alongside my two co-founders and a few colleagues on a project I’m excited (and a little nervous) to share with you all! Like many of us, I’ve lived a tortured existence with AI coding (is it vibes?) over the past few months - I think November was a big moment with this. But, one thing I’ve noticed after building orchestration layer after orchestration layer is that the thing I always came back to was “what the hell is Claude Code actually doing?” Perhaps it’s because of the time Claude Code got…
Jun 2026 · backplanes.com
- 22IB
I've been experimenting with ways to increase AI adoption for non-technical people. Basically, all companies are pushing for AI because it's all over the news and they feel left behind but most people have no clue where to start. I think 90% of people (ie non coders) are sufficiently well served by using cowork instead of claude code or something similar. If we can get people from sales, customer support, marketing, etc to collaborate with skills and cowork to form a company brain, I think it's gold. So I think there's opportunity for the community to share skills that work well for 1000s of…
Jun 2026 · claudinho.xyz
- 23IV
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
- 24IB
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
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →