tomduncalf

Audiogalaxy was awesome. I loved how you could browse every file that had ever been online, rather than just what was online now, and queue them up for when they came online again. I’d just leave it running on our dial up connection when everyone went out of the house (no dedicated line so you’d clog up the phone, the good old days haha) and then come back to some exciting downloads I’d totally forgotten that I ever queued

Don’t tell anyone! Haha

Yeah this reminded me of “the good old days” of the internet when every site felt like this :)

Hey Jules! This looks awesome, excited to check it out :) Hope you're doing well! Tom

Yeah I’m surprised by what a design misstep it was. The shiny corners of icons on iOS look so tacky and on macOS the corner radius mismatch is crazy. Also not a fan of the “bulbous” shapes of things with excessive rounded corners.

Whenever I use my personal Mac or iPad, still on the old OS, I wonder what they were thinking - I would guess it was rushed to hit the annual release, as it does have potential in parts.

That said, it looks from the few screenshots in this like you’re able to pare it back to something much closer to how it used to look, which is great and I’m glad they’re taking feedback on board.

Schwung is great. See also the recent new firmware for the Elektron Monomachine (old unsupported hardware) created using LLMs

FWIW you can bypass quite a lot of the Max visual stuff by using the JS support, which now finally supports modern JS (the v8 object). A lot of the LOM (Live API) is exposed there though you will no doubt need to use Max objects for some stuff. They also have web UI support with jweb.

I get the frustration coming to Max as a regular developer, but actually when I bothered to learn it was one of the most rewarding uses of time and I find it really quite fun to work in (and frustrating sometimes of course! But the JS support helps). You just need to forget everything you know about programming lol

Ha yeah I have considered the same. There’s not enough info exposed via the Python or Max APIs (or indeed this one) to sync all the state you’d care about so I think the only option would be syncing the actual als files (which are zipped XML) which means you’d only be able to sync at save points

The screenshots of RISC OS bring back fond memories of playing with it in our school computer room (which was mostly BBC Micros but had a few RISC) - mostly playing Lemmings as I recall! It felt pretty cool at the time though

I have been using the app for years but literally just because I like the step counter widget. I had no idea it did all this! Will try it for sure. Cool read.

I hooked Claude up to Ableton’s Python API last year and it seemed pretty promising https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2WxSB75U6vg and more recently I created a skill for Claude to manipulate Ableton arrangements (which aren’t exposed via the API so you need to manipulate the file, which is zipped xml, instead).

Both seemed pretty promising and fitted with how I’d like AI to assist rather than replace me for creative tasks.

This reminds me I should open source them as I’ve had no time to do more work on them!

Yeah +1, at the start of my career (mid 2000s) all the web designs were done in Photoshop. I think this was true until 2010/11 at least, when I first encountered Axure being used for some design stuff. I’ve never used Fireworks and never saw it in the wild (UK, in case it was a regional thing)

For you maybe but seems a reasonable compromise to hit the price point and I bet you’d miss it less than you think

As chance would have it, I just tried this for the first time as I wanted to bind a keyboard shortcut to an option from a menu bar app which doesn’t support keybinding. ChatGPT wrote a script which uses AppleScript to do it. Really anwesome, and excited to find more cool things to do with it!

This is going to be a huge success and to me makes so much sense as a product. I’m always amazed at the range of opinions people have on these topics. Might even pick one up for myself to use on the go, I had been thinking about an Air but I don’t need much by the way of power in all honesty

I’ll take this opportunity to plug a couple of experiments I’ve not progressed any further but thought were fun:

- Using Claude as a “pair producer” in Ableton by giving it access to the Ableton remote script API so it can create patterns - this was 1 year ago so I’d be interested to see how newer models can do https://youtu.be/2WxSB75U6vg

- A Claude Code skill which teaches it how to arrange Ableton loops into songs (by modifying the XML as there isn’t an API for this): https://youtu.be/P6Zw6f6CEbI and https://youtu.be/tVZigxFceUE

But the model doesn't need to read the node_modules to write a React app, it just needs to write the React code (which it is heavily post-trained to be able to use). So the fair counter example is like:

function Hello() { return <button>Hello</buttton> }

Tangent but the screen scratches mentioned from the keyboard are annoying. Every generation of MacBook has suffered from them and everyone’s seems to have it after a while, I guess it’s just physics when it gets stuffed in a bag etc, but any good tips to avoid it? I’ve heard mixed things about keeping a cloth in there

I thought this was an absolutely fascinating look into reverse engineering hardware. If you’re a musician, check out the plugins at https://dsp56300.wordpress.com/ - you can bit perfect emulate famous 90s synths including Access Virus, Waldorf MicroQ and XT, Nord Lead and now Roland JP8000

This was my first thought too haha. That would be mind blowing

It has a similar feel to Vletrmx21 by Autechre if you dig the spooky ambient feel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-fhfYhqBr4

Yeah I’ve almost never got in an Uber that was notably unclean or damaged in some way in London. Most of the times I’ve got one in SF, it’s been an unpleasant experience and so I now Waymo when I can there.

I’ve never had to wait more than 5 minutes at SFO I don’t think and the system seems ok to me

It is, but I don’t think this a bad offering - up until recently all iPhone cameras were 12mp, so you still get “good enough to print” quality. I guess it’s a bit of marketing speak but I don’t mind - to me it seems they made good choices on the lenses this year. 5x always seemed a bit too much without something in between but hopefully 4x is a decent compromise while still enabling “8x” (which I suspect is important for marketing and honestly will be quite fun)

This made me google Buzz and it turns out it was recoded by the author and there was an update in 2022. Not sure if it’s still developed. I’m not on a Windows machine so won’t be able to try it easily unfortunately, wish it was open source so it could be ported to Mac

https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=590922

Buzz was so great. I came across it when I learned James Holden produced his early stuff on it and was hooked. It had a good community with hundreds of synths and effects you could download from Buzzmachines. It was such a shame they lost the source code, I’d have loved to see how it developed.

If you work for a large org you’ll have some kind of enterprise agreement in place guaranteeing this. I can’t imagine they’d risk violating it regardless, the outcry could ruin them

I enjoyed watching O3 do web searches etc. Seems that with GPT-5 you only get little summaries and it’s also way less web search happy which is a shame, O3 was so good for research

Ha! I was at Orange. I suspect all the carriers had similar setups. Yeah I don’t miss working with that lol

Early in my career I worked on a carrier's mobile internet portal in the days before smartphones. It was XSLT all the way down, including individual XSLT transforms for every single component the CMS had for every single handset we supported (hundreds) as they all had different capabilities and browser bugs. It was not that fun to write complex logic in haha but was kind of an interesting thing to work on, before iPhone etc came along and everything could just render normal websites.