Alternatives
Products that do what On Making Music with the Machine does
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
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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
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After two years of development, I'm super excited to release Beat Maker! This is my take on what I hope is the best free, web-based drum machine. My goal was to build something that was not only fun and easy to use for beginners but also powerful enough for serious producers. I did extensive research on existing drum machines, analyzed their UX, and tried to build something that adds something new. It's a nearly 100% client-side app, written in ClojureScript, and is a PWA so you can install it to your home screen for an app-like experience. Besides the standard grid editor, Beat Maker has…
Sep 2025 · dopeloop.ai
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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
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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
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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
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I've been tinkering with a browser-based rhythm game creation tool. The pitch is simple: AI makes the music, Essentia.js figures out the beats, and you write the game logic in JS. Demo: https://rhythm-seodang-web.vercel.app/ The problem I wanted to solve: most rhythm game workflows are heavy. Proprietary editors, manual charting, fixed gameplay patterns, desktop-only. I wanted something where you could just... open a browser tab and start messing around. How it works: - Music comes from AI services (Suno/Udio). No user uploads, no copyright headaches. - Essentia.js (WASM…
Dec 2025 · rhythm-seodang-web.vercel.app
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As a side project for a hockey manager game, I created a small audio tracker, "HM Tracker," which was used to make the game's music. It is a browser-based tracker-style music workstation. All sound is procedurally generated from oscillators - no samples, no plugins. The UI lets you edit patterns on a step grid, pick instruments and chords, then export as a standalone JS music engine or WAV file. Built with vanilla JS and the Web Audio API (best experienced on a desktop browser). Made in the '90s demoscene spirit (at least the looks, anyway). Would love any feedback!
Mar 2026 · manager.kiekko.pro
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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
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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
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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
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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
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