Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Physical Cassette Tapes from MP3s. Static brutal site with no back end
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
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. Physical Cassette Tapes from MP3s. Static brutal site with no back end launched in 2016; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 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 · its alternatives →
- 2
Send a Mixtape▲186Give a digital playlist on a hand-crafted paper cassette
2021 · veteranstruckdrivingschool.com · its alternatives →
- 3
Or more precisely, my little site maker... It is a personal tool that I thoroughly enjoyed making, and enjoy using to write my website . A caveat before any more; nobody was supposed to promote this insanity. Like, terrible things have been done involving inotify and xdotool. But. It showed up on HN some months ago. That too while it was still, shall we say, fermenting. It got "done" some time thence, and of course one could not let the half-past just be. So here we are, for better or worse. Thank you HN mods for helping me repost! _\\// The README explains all, animated GIFs and…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
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CassetteAI▲171The AI-powered music producer, create your dream music
2023 · cassetteai.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Beats, a web-based drum machinefree▲160Hello 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 · its alternatives →
- 9
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 · its alternatives →
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- 12
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 · its alternatives →
- 13ZA
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 · its alternatives →
- 14PF
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 · groktar.com · its alternatives →
- 15
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 · its alternatives →
- 16
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 · its alternatives →
- 17
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 · its alternatives →
- 18
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 · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
- 21MP
Ever find good porn but can't get to it right away? What about something you really enjoyed, where do you save it? If you're like me, you don't want nsfw sites in your browsing history and especially not in your bookmarks. So I built http://xstashed.com/hn/ (clickable in comments) - a place to stash your nsfw links. While it's a minimal viable product, I do have a basic roadmap that can be viewed here http://xstashed.com/todo/. I just wanted to get this in the hands of potential users to get feedback early on. On the tech side of things I've built this thing nimble so that I can quickly…
2013 · xstashed.com · its alternatives →
- 22IM
Find information, resources and relevant links for madbitties.com. This domain may be for sale.
2014 · blog.madbitties.com · its alternatives →
- 23AA
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 · its alternatives →
- 24MO
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 · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →