Alternatives
Products that do what I've been posting a sound I made everyday day for the last year does
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…
- 1AA
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
- 2MW
2012 · getworkdonemusic.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
- 4WD
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
- 5IJ
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
- 6MP
My weekly(ish) video logs tracking my progress of building a completely sound statically typed language and structural editor. The motivation is to make lots of invalid programs unrepresentable.
2022 · petersaxton.uk
- 7SO
Hi HN, I've been programming for about three years, and this is my first full-stack web app. It's a tool for organizing musical ideas. Building and deploying it has been a great learning experience, and in that spirit I'd be grateful for any thoughts or suggestions if you care to take a look. Thank you! source: https://bit.ly/3giqrBU Why: Composing music is different for everyone, yet some practices are employed by many musicians. One such practice is to record a musical idea on a phone, capturing the idea at its freshest, and for many, clearest. This often leads to a lengthy…
2022 · soundseeker.app
- 8IB
I used to watch hundreds of hours of lofi beats on youtube while I was coding, but I got really sick of all the ads. I decided to build a better alternative - It's a configurable space for you to hang out online while you work, with a ton of relaxing music and backgrounds. Its got useful tools built in like a timer to keep track of how long you've been locked in, and a notepad for todos or scribbling down ideas while you work. Honestly this is the first tool I've built that I personally use every day, so I'm hoping some of you out there can get some use out of it too!
2025 · lofizone.com
- 9IM
Some of you may know me as a freelance developer and the founder of BugMuncher, but my primary passion in life is actually music. I've recently decided to have a go at making some money from my music by submitting songs to Audio Jungle. So far I've only submitted 2 songs, but both were approved for sale first time, so I guess I'm doing something right :) My second submission is a song I wrote specifically with tech start-ups' landing page videos in mind: http://audiojungle.net/item/introducing-success/3581039 Hopefully it can find a home on someone's landing page :)
2012
- 10IB
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
- 11SM
This is my noisy and ugly baby... but I love it...
Jul 2026 · octetta.github.io
- 12AT
I love music and I'm always trying to discover new music that I can enjoy. In the past years I was using a fairly tedious process of organizing the music albums (or DJ sets, radio shows) in a few lists: - Want to Listen - Listened - Listened (and liked) I wanted to keep track of these lists, what I discovered each month/year and share all this activity and lists with my friends. For that, I was using a combination of tools that weren't made exactly for this job (Discogs+Spotify+IM apps), resulting in a cumbersome experience. So a few months ago I started this hobby project, with the…
2022
- 13IV
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
- 14PN
>>>>> TimeForZen.com <<<<< This took months to put together. Learning javascript, using the sound manager 2 api. Finding the perfect creative commons photos on flickr. It's such a ridiculously simple site (just a curated list of music) but I went through hell debugging and getting it to work. I learned an extreme amount. My advice to designers who can't code, keep it simple, just get it done don't worry about optimization, don't worry about a backend. Code everything manually if you have to. I've kept it simple out of necessity. I'm a designer, not a…
2012
- 15PA
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
- 16GM
2011 · groovebud.com
- 17BA
I am a product designer by profession, and recently, I ventured into coding and started developing applications. Today, I'm excited to share a project I've been passionately working on. The concept is a voice-activated journal: just voice-record your thoughts, and the app will transcribe them into text. I built this to help those like me who struggle to build a journaling habit. Also has features that encourage habbit building like a streak/tracker and a threshold marker encouraging you to record a minimum amount. I used OpneAI Whisper to power the transcriptions which means you can…
2023 · main.d35lo6kdqvpjht.amplifyapp.com
- 18AL
A buddy and I decided to hack on this little project this weekend, putting in about 12 hours. It's running Ruby on Rails, deployed to Heroku. We tried to keep things super lean with different gems handling user accounts, mailchimp for an email list and super lean styling/layout. Everything should work well enough on mobile devices, too, so give it a look! Right now the magic all happens via the Soundcloud API (of course), but we're exploring different ways to make this appeal to a broader audience of music listeners. We'd love your feedback! Here's the site:…
2014
- 19IR
Hey HN, I'm a student shipping projects on my nights & weekends (today is no other) Music is a huge aspect of my life. I appreciate tons of artists and constantly search for a new way to experience it. Then something catches my eye... An iPod. This seemed like a perfect way to have fun while listening to music + the added mindfulness of intentionally selecting an album. Sadly, it's a no go in 2025. Lack of Bluetooth, Spotify sync and high prices was a deal-breaker for me. That's why I decided to build an iPod player for your desktop. Yup, you heard it right. From the prototype as I was just…
2025 · desktopipod.com
- 20IM
So, I'm learning VIM and made this yesterday, I pretend to increment it as I learn new stuff. You move with HJKL and that's it for now. Don't let the sublimes consume you. http://worms.io/vimwarrior/
2016
- 21WR
I've been working on a C-based open source sound engine as part of a book project and wanted an approachable way for people to try it out without having to build anything. Through the magic of emscripten (which I'm totally amazed by) and miniaudio (which has given me new life late in my development career), and a smidge of vibe-coded HTML/JS (web-dev is not my jam), this page will let you try out the tooling. I gave a lightning talk on the ASCII notation at ElixirConf EU last month here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnJ0osgiqWM There's a work-in-progress tutorial for…
May 2026 · octetta.github.io
- 22MN
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
- 23KM
Hi, I'm co-founder and CTO of Kaizen. The project started as just a weekend project with me and a music producer friend. It has since grown into a community of artists looking to share their music more frequently and engage with their fans more consistently. We've just launched on ProductHunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/kaizen-3 We would love any thoughts or feedback!
2023 · kaizen.place
- 24IV
2014 · soundcloud.com
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