I vibe coded a DAW for the terminal. how'd I do?
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,…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
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, with ~1,100 tests. I don't actually know. It's funny because I've always been the one writing code, and now I was everybody except the one writing code: QA, Product, Design. Some prompts that worked well: "Looking at this codebase, what looks like an obvious retrofit?" "Where can we lean on the compiler?" After an agent completed a task, I'd interview it — where did you have trouble, what felt like a hack, what would you do differently. v1 was clojure, v2 was java, v3 is rust. v4 will be stones and sticks. So nowadays out here in the deep future, I think programming will become a matter of taste. Here's what I think demonstrates my sensibilities: - Accessibility: This is what I'm most proud of. TUIs are usually terrible for screen readers. In Imbolc, every action in the UI is available as a typed command (after I started typing this up I thought, is that true? turns out it wasn't, so now the compiler enforces this.). - LAN collaboration: Multiple people can connect to a shared session over the local network and share midi clock, tuning, effects buses, etc. Audio is never sent over the network. - Weird musical choices: With the "Global" just intonation setting, your absolute tuning can drift over time. I was thinking about how an accordion looks kind of like a qwerty keyboard, so I added a quasi Stradella layout. A432 by default, and so on. - Command palette, themes, keybindings, Diataxis docs. It requires SuperCollider installed (scsynth on PATH). macOS and Linux 1st class, BSDs are next on the roadmap, no Windows. It's still alpha, there are plenty of rough edges. But it is genuinely fun to dink around on, I'd love to know what you all think.
Does the same job
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Hello HN, not many will know what this tool is about, but it's launch day and I always dreamed of posting on HN. Let's start! This is a tool for people using eurorack gear. For synth people. What is cool about my tool is that I show the signal flow with a graph. Here's the official press text: After a decade of stagnation in this space we are excited to present patcher.xyz: the modern way to manage everything modular. It’s a tool for professionals, enthusiasts, and casual wigglers. Novadays artists must develop their own means of taking notes, often on paper, since there is no common format…
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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.…
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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…
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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/
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