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Comment by alexbainter | Hacker News Reader

Hey folks, I'm the creator of the site and the music on it. I'm happy people are enjoying the music.

I see some people are having a rough time on mobile devices so I wanted to help with that. I have found that iOS Safari will mute the site if you have your iPhone in silent mode (there might be a way for me to fix this but I haven't explored it much yet). However, you'll probably find that many of the pieces snap crackle and pop a bit on mobile devices. I'm looking into ways to improve that but for now unfortunately the best advice I have is to try it on your desktop or laptop or to try some of the less complex pieces towards the end of the list. I really appreciate the feedback; I've only done so much testing with the devices I have available so hearing from more people with a larger range of devices is super helpful. Feel free to open issues on Github as well: https://github.com/generative-music/generative.fm/issues

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I just left a top-level comment, but this is an old topic now so I don't know if you'll see it -- I wanted to thank you for making this and releasing it for free; it really helped me to find the kind of calm concentration that usually eludes me.

You're very welcome, I'm glad you're enjoying the music and thank you for commenting. I'm excited some people are offering to pay for the site but I intend to keep all of the music free so as many people can enjoy it as possible. I also like to listen when I need to concentrate. That's really the reason I made the site, so I have something to listen to while I work.

You could keep the site free while still allowing people to pay for it if they want to.

(A service like Liberapay might make this easy for you to do.)

This is fantastic. I love that it is a progressive web app. It would be nice to have a feature to populate the cache in one tap, so I can take it with me in the underground without having to play each song first.

You may find this useful. http://euterpea.com/haskell-school-of-music/

Really nice design, was there any inspiration? I would like to use something like those squares to illustrate an ebook.

Thanks, I have to admit I really just ripped off Google Play Music's interface. The square icons were inspired by the album art for Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto's "Virus" series of albums. I made a program which generates them for me. The way it works is to split the square into squares, rectangles, and triangles, and then randomly choose which to stroke and fill.

Thanks! Your reply is much appreciated.

This sounds really interesting. However if you do want to distribute this widely, I would check if they have any patents on their devices because stupid American IP laws.

Does everyone hear the same unique piece or is the generator client side and random per device?

It is generated client side, so each time you click play the music will be unique to that performance.

Any thoughts about making the client-side "seed" saveable?

Would love to be able to save/replay/share sections that I really enjoyed (e.g. bookmark the seed(s) + offset/range).

Do you have any plan to make this works as a progressive web app? Would really enjoy having this on my phone, and optionally have it works while offline (with cached files, etc).

Thanks for this, I've been using it since yesterday :)

Thanks, glad you like it! Have you tried using it offline? It should already work as you described, though I have to admit I've only tested in Chrome. The caveat is that you can only play songs offline if they were played online once before. I realize none of this information is communicated in the app, I need to do a better job of that.

Really loving it. I think on iOS it’s possible to have a Safari tab keep playing audio in the background. listentothe.cloud at least does this. With your site, audio stops as soon as I close Safari.

As stated in other comments, if this was an app (in my Mac menu bar and/or on my iPhone) this would be the quickest $3-5/month I’d spend.

This is a fantastic piece of software. I’ll use it a lot while programming. The generated performances are great.

Thanks for explaining how to make it work on iPhone. Adding a notice message for iPhone users to disable silent mode on their phone would be good since I would have never guessed.

Agreed, I'll either be fixing it or including some explanation in the next release. Thanks!

Cool! Love the music btw, awesome work!

Is there a meaning to the colors and shapes in each the rectangles?

Interesting project, enjoying it a lot!

Came here just to say how clear your website is. The music itself is great - been listening for quite a while. Thanks for this.

Great job. I'd pay $5 a month for this.

Great stuff. Look into Fourier transformation / inverse Fourier transformations and clipping to remove the crackling sound.

Can you elaborate? Why would a transform be needed only on mobile devices? Why wouldn't the OS handle whatever's needed to produce audio in a platform-agnostic way, especially on the web? Very interested to know more.

I suspect the commenter meant that when the buffer runs empty because the device can't compute new samples quickly enough, the last seen power spectrum (power versus frequency) is briefly maintained in the output. This filler is computed by a cheaper process.

The crackling is probably due to missed buffers. Additional processing of the sound would likely only serve to exacerbate the problem.

This is wonderful! Thank you

A heads up. Your site seems to be fingerprinting my device through audio (firefox addin for audio fingerprint blocking).

Have you confirmed that the add-on doesn't simply trigger if a website uses the WebAudio API? All fingerprinting techniques also have legitimate applications. If they could be reliably distinguished from non-malicious uses, browsers would have blocked them long ago.

So a website designed to play sound is accessing your sound information?

...yes, otherwise, how would it play sound?

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