Musicians Are Duct-Taping Five Apps Together to Practice
Musicians and music hobbyists are frustrated by the lack of integrated tools and workflows for music creation, practice, and discovery. They often resort to building their own solutions to overcome the limitations of existing fragmented platforms and address specific creative roadblocks. This points to a need for more holistic and personalized music experiences.
SOURCES (60)
“Thank you so much for the kind words! I’m really glad to hear that the "radio-like" feeling resonated with you. That’s exactly what I was aiming for—sometimes you just want to press play and trust a human ear instead of fighting an automated algorithm. It's…”
“I like the extreme simplicity of what you made, and that it's human-curated. Sometimes you just want a more radio-like experience guided by a real person (or people), and this fits the bill. I have been thinking along the same lines for a long time, but I took the opposite approach and built something perhaps overly-complicated to help with discovery and curation. Like you I wanted to share it with the world, so I put it out there for others to use as well. You can check it out at tunistry.c”
“Super cool! Probably an achievement or badge system would give even more incentive!”
“Been messing around with Elo ratings and thought it'd be fun to apply it to metal bands. Made a simple site where you get shown two bands and you just click the one you think is better. The ratings update in real time, and there's a live ranking page. It's 100 bands right now. The rankings will shift over time purely based on votes. Not monetized, no ads, no accounts. Just wanted to see what happens when a bunch of metalheads vote on this stuff. Link: https://metal-elo.vercel.app ”
“I know it’s been posted around here a few times, including once or twice from the dev, but man, what a breath of fresh air Aurral is for music discovery. Soul{fill in the blank}, DroppedNeedle, Digarr, Mixarr, and a slew of others have all been spun up, and shut right back down. Not bashing those, but they didn’t tackle discovery for niche stuff well. I listen to hot garbage. Yes, hot garbage. The kind of music that’s nearly impossible to find, and no one else in their right mind has any interes”
Wait.. free, open source, privacy focused, a really cool feature. This is awesome 👌 But may I ask why you made it and why free?
“I've been trying to find ambient music for my game for a long time. I'd most like to get as close as possible to the Postal 1 style. Specifically, Postal 1 draws from Cuckooland Vol. 2: Ghost in the Machine, but of course, that album is subject to copyright. So I'd appreciate any help finding royalty-free music that's as close as possible to that album. Thanks to everyone for reading! submitted by /u/Lonely_Total2591 [link] [comments]”
“Not asking for an exact number. Just a rough estimate, I'm curious. You did the work I assume you have a rough idea in your head. 50/50, 60/40, ....”
“Hey everyone! I am a working game composer, and recently wanted to spend some time working on getting a Mario style sound. Rather than just sitting on these tracks, I thought I may as well share them with developers who may want to actually use them! Each track is loopable, and while I have named each track after a specific “biome”, feel free to use them any way you want! My only request is that if used, please ensure to credit me :) You can download the tracks and a text document which contains”
“> what made you pick it back up after all this time? Mostly, finally having a partner that programmed much better than I do!”
“There are even entire artists, where I only like 1 or 2 of their songs. I think Radiohead is one of the best bands of all time, and I only like Pyramid Song, Let Down, and Weird Fishes.”
“Depends on the work and the day. I've found that for days where I'm music is pulling my attention away, foreign (non-english in my case) bands really help. Lofi can only go on for so long. But bands like Paranoul have added some freshness to a lighter rock playlist, without lyrics that i understand. On the days I'm not having that problem, anything and everything from Gustav Holtz, to Bob Dylan, The Notorious B.I.G., and so on”
“I mix it up. Sometimes, it's smooth jazz. Sometimes, it's EDM. And if I'm focusing on a stressful project, I have a playlist of my favorite boss battle music on the Nintendo Music app on my phone.”
“If you have the time, you could also use AI to create your own music. Just make sure you don’t purposely mimic a known artist’s work. Save your prompts. Suno is great. $10 per month gets you a lot of music.”
“Long time customer! I bought one after your original post on HN. Congrats on the milestone. Honestly, it's such a good product and I'm such a bad and inconsistent piano player that I completely forget it exists for months at a time. Then I remember about it, open the app, and everything is there: my attempt to figure out a song, my kids smashing the keys as hard as they can, my cat walking across the keyboard. It's such a joy.”
“Pulled out my electric guitar from the closet because I haven’t played it in years. Realized I could maybe see if a cloud LLM could help whip up some software to add sound effects, since I already have a guitar-to-usb audio interface. Gave a lazy prompt, and it cooked for almost 40 minutes. The result was a fully working setup, basically meeting my needs. This is so mind blowing that I spent the last 30-60 minutes wrangling iMovie to anonymize the video I took when I was shook, all the while thi”
“Hey everyone! Im an aspiring composer for media (games, movies, shows, whatever), my favorite composer is keiichi okabe who worked on the NieR franchise if yall even care. Anyway, for this kind of composing you mostly work with writers and creative directors who give you a scene, character, feeling to work with so you can make a piece around it. I really would like to become better at conveying what the writers want through my compositions, but the problem is i need some ideas. So thats why Im a”
“"Picking which ocean to get lost in, not the destination." That's a cleaner line than anything in my own app copy, and I might actually steal it for the hint text (with credit). Non-deterministic is exactly the bar I'm holding myself to: even with a heading set, Course never promises a specific station and the default stays fully random. You described the design constraint back to me better than I wrote it. And yeah, not forcing the choice on day one was deliberate. The second”
“Hmmm, maybe your browser needs permissions to you microphone? Usually Chrome / Safari show a popup asking yes/no to grant”
“Heyo - I'm a Guitar / Software Engineer of 20 years, always wanted a way to jam online. I've used several platforms over the years but they always seem to require memberships, hardware purchases, and/or a lot of network configurations sometimes on the fly. So I tried to pull together a browser / PlainJS version leveraging WebRTC and WebSockets. No installation, no registration, free to use, anyone can just drop in and create or join a room. I add some things like a centralized drum machi”
“Traditional artist: spent 10 years of their life learning to use music software and download/steal a.s choose one of many same samples that has been used for 30 years. Maybe add a few bass rhytmes, and if they wish learn to sing. AI artist: spending 10 min learning how to quickly with sharp complex prompting chose fractals of several of the same samples that traditional artist has been using since early days of the internet. But profesional AI artist artist goes past that and takes only fractals”
“I stick to the YouTube Audio Library for most of my stuff. When I need multiple tracks, I look for music that fits the mood of each segment. For action, I go for high-energy tracks; for downtime, something chill. Use keywords like "upbeat" or "ambient" when searching. I've also liked finding tracks with the same vibe or tempo to keep the flow smooth. It's a trial-and-error deal.”
“For anything 15-30 minutes, the easiest system is picking by mood/energy category instead of song-by-song. The Audio Library lets you filter by mood tags (Calm, Bright, Dark, Energetic, Sad, etc.) - grab a small playlist per editing session (5-8 tracks) that all share a similar overall energy, instead of searching per-scene. Then during editing you're picking from a pre-vetted small pool instead of re-searching the whole library every time, which is where most of the time actually goes. For”
“Wife wanted to use Zelda Music 🎶 I was hesitant but it was surprisingly good submitted by /u/Nintendo_forever [link] [comments]”
“It would be awesome if there was a function in here to batch replace album art, I got lots of ugly art.”
“Hello everyone! I'm creating one add for one of my products and I would like to know what music I could use for it. I'd like to hear some opinions on what has worked for you or heard/seen works for others. Thank you in advance! submitted by /u/Arlathannis [link] [comments]”
“Over the last few weeks I’ve been designing a dedicated music player because I feel phones have turned music into something we consume in the background rather than something we intentionally enjoy. The goal isn’t to replace a phone. The goal is to create a product people actually want to wear—something that feels as much like a fashion accessory as a music player. Think of how people wear watches, headphones, or cameras because they enjoy having them with them, not just because they’re function”
“Now go to r/Suno or r/udiomusic to generate the songs (actually, forget r/udiomusic . Whatever you generate using it will be owned by them (EDIT: oh, turns out that Suno owns the output as well.)”
“Thank you so much! I’m going to play around on GarageBand and see what I can figure out, and I’m sure I’ll come up with a few questions then!”
“Thank you so much for this! Yes, I had gotten as far into watching youtube videos to find the suggestion to export from Zencastr and edit in garageband, which I've never used. Thanks so much for passing along the video!”
“Best bet would be to create a 3 beat opening in garage band (if you’re worried about copyright)”
“Are you using Garageband as your music program? If so, just export the audio from Zencastr, import into Garageband. Create two more tracks, label them intro and outro, import the royalty free audio and line it up where you want the music to start and end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ofeTvh4Liw”
Yes, tech death metal is the best for me. Ouroboros and Necrophagist