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Comment by staplung | Hacker News Reader

Cool, but I don't see how it's sorting anything. It just seems to play a randomized arrangement of the slices. You can re-randomize as much as you like but there's no sort option as far as I can see.

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It randomizes slices of the sample and begins to play the slices in the random order. Meanwhile it begins the bubble sort algorithm at a pace that matches the tempo, sorting the slices into their chronological order. Throughout, it only plays the unsorted slices. (I was kinda hoping it would play the sorted sample at the end.)

I actually wanted it to play them as it went, so that it would be <unsorted><sorted> each time through, with the former shrinking and the latter growing.

The idea is that it slices the Amen Break into however many slices you specify, and the list being sorted is the indices for those slices. At each step, it plays the slice the pivot is being compared to.

Because it only plays the samples being compared, it never plays the sorted chunks, so it's missing a "punchline" of sorts.

I was surprised at how frustrating it was to not hear the sorted result at the end.

You're right. It doesn't play the sorted parts, which is strange. I expected to have a series of random-then-controlled slices with the random part getting shorter and the controlled part getting longer, but it really is just a shortening loop of random beats.

Would have been cool if it played the sorted ones at the end as a final run through victory lap

Did you play it to the end? It's absolutely sorting from smallest to largest. Unless you have a confused understanding of a bubble sort, it's doing a bubble sort

Not the OP but I stopped listening pretty quickly because I was confused about how it was sorted.

It wasn’t until I read your comment that I realised the sorting happened while you were listening rather than before hand.

Same! thanks for saving the experience for me :)

So it's sorting from earliest to latest, really?

The value that is being sorted isn't obvious to me. It's obvious that it is sorting it. I'm guessing maybe some dB level of each of the hits/notes. If that was the case, I'd expect the initial unsorted view to line up with the pattern of the waveforms which is not the case. Maybe it's just an unsorted list of values sorted in sync to the rhythm. It's weird though that the segment corresponds to a segment of the audio. I just don't see how they are linked.

It's sorting by index of the slice. Pressing "shuffle" jumbles the slices up. So it puts the slices of the break back in the correct order. You never hear the result.

Set it to 8 slices and it becomes easy to see what it's doing: look at the waveform and the now-playing highlight jumping around.

I was confused at first at what the different "levels" mean. But they're not levels, they're just indices.

I would suggest the author changes the UI to just show a number instead of a bar, to make this clearer.

Give it a minute or two.

It’s sorting by time

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