Alternatives
Products that do what Physical Cassette Tapes from MP3s. Static brutal site with no back end does
I had a silly idea for awhile, making actual cassette mixtapes from MP3s. I thought it was a bit obscene, and it amused me. So I built a static site with Cactus then plugged in a Jotform that handles media uploads and payments. Designwise I opted for mid 90s brutalism, down to midi music (on desktop it starts playing smoke on the water) you can check it out at 420verload.com
- 1IB
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
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I’ve recently released my solo project Audiocube I wanted to make a 3D DAW, where spatial audio, physics, and virtual acoustics are all directly integrated into the engine. This makes it easy to create music in 3D, and experiment with new techniques which aren’t possible in traditional DAWs and plugins. I’d love to get any feedback on this software (Mac/Windows) to make it better. You can download it for free through the website. Thanks, Noah
2025 · audiocube.app
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2022 · noisecraft.app
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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
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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
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2012 · jpc.heroku.com
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RM2000 Tape Recorder makes it stupid simple to grab audio samples and organize them: just record the sample, give it a title (and maybe some tags), and it is saved neatly into a directory of your choosing. I'm a huge datahoarder and have always appreciated tools / services like PureRef and Are.na which help me make sense of everything I collect. Those services concern themselves with images and video - I wondered, why can't the same be done with music and audiofiles? I actually got the inspiration for the filenaming scheme from the Emacs Denote package - every sample is saved in the…
2025 · rm2000.app
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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
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Having read several comments in other threads about frustrations with digital music and streaming, I thought this could potentially be interesting to some of you. It's a very small attempt at bringing back an experience that we seemingly lost when going fully digital. When I was looking around whether something like this already existed, I could only find some commercial (and discontinued) attempts, but nothing based on open standards. So I made a draft of what I think an open single-file music album format could look like. It is very simple, and basically just a specification of how to…
2022 · zipped-album.github.io
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As you can tell, I haven't really been sure how to pitch this site. Maybe it's trying to do too much. It's still a work in progress, but I would love to get some feedback. Thanks HN! HOWTO: http://groktar.com/?m=kTD4PzaNwv Lagrima: http://groktar.com/?m=TLZgtrjM6n
2013
- 16IV
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
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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
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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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Hey HN! I've been working on Muxamp for over a year now, and I decided that there's no point in keeping the source closed. (I never planned on making money from it.) I've learned a lot since I started, and I hope others can benefit from its release--and perhaps teach me a thing or two as well :)
2013 · github.com
- 20IB
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
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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
- 22IV
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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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
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I'm posting this long mix of 200 "futuristic" music recordings, in chronological order (from the mid 1970's to the mid 1980's). Some are obvious (eg: "She Blinded Me With Science") while others are long forgotten (eg: G.G. Tonet's "Dedicated To Norbert Wiener" or Jyl's "Silicon Valley") --- Circa 1980 Mixtape https://soundcloud.com/italian_radio_1983/space-italo-etc-circa-1980 --- While the theme of the linked mix (ie: tech) probably interests some here, it is likely too fluffy for many others so apologies for that. This thing took me almost two years to finish, so in a…
2023
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