Lars Wikman on the history of ID3 tags:

If you were a Winamp user back in the day, or curate an MP3 collection currently, you might recognize the humble ID3 tag. It is what the metadata in the MP3 file is made up of. First it was pretty limited in the version later dubbed ID3v1. Like any good 2.0 they added a ton more fields, features, removed character limits and it was suddenly ID3v2. The latest spec is ID3v2.4 while the most commonly adopted one seems to be ID3v2.3. I recently found myself having a reason to dig into this specification.

I wonder what reason he might have to dig into this spec? Could it be for a soon-to-be-announced collab with his friends at Changelog? 😏

This post is not about the technical intricacies of the format… This is about a simpler time, where people saw the wild possibilities of music on computers and when people cared about files, damnit. This is about some of the most interesting and entertaining things I’ve run across while reading the spec.

Welcome to Song Encoder, a special series of The Changelog podcast featuring people who create at the intersection of software and music. This episode features Pwnie Award-winning songwriter Forrest Brazeal.

Welcome to Song Encoder, a special series of The Changelog podcast featuring people who create at the intersection of software and music. This episode features $STDOUT and contains explicit language.

Jordan Eldredge:

Webamp.org’s visualizer, Butterchurn, now uses WebAssembly (Wasm) to achieve better performance and improved security. Whereas most projects use Wasm by compiling pre-existing native code to Wasm, Butterchurn uses an in-browser compiler to compile untrusted user-supplied code to fast and secure Wasm at runtime.

AI is being used to transform the most personal instrument we have, our voice, into something that can be “played.” This is fascinating in and of itself, but Yotam Mann from Never Before Heard Sounds is doing so much more! In this episode, he describes how he is using neural nets to process audio in real time for musicians and how AI is poised to change the music industry forever.

Tenacity is an easy-to-use, cross-platform multi-track audio editor/recorder for Windows, MacOS, GNU/Linux and other operating systems and is developed by a group of volunteers as open source software.

Sound familiar? Maybe because it’s a fork of the historically awesome Audacity project that promises:

no telemetry, crash reports and other shenanigans like that!

Not ringing any bells? Check out Audacity’s privacy policy changes, new CLA, and data collection attempts.

Oli Larkin:

This is a curated list of my favourite music DSP and audio programming resources. It was originally meant to be an official “Awesome list”, but apparently you are not meant to write in the first person, so it is now a “more awesome” list.

I’m still giving this the awesome topic, despite his first person point of view. Oli is a long-time audio programmer, so he’s well positioned to curate a list like this one.

The music you hear is generated in your browser by a randomised algorithm, below you can see the notes and parameters that are currently in use. You can also interact with various parameters and buttons manually. The green autopilot switches change how automatic playback is. Leave them on for a lean-back experience. Buttons labelled ⟳ will generate new patterns. Source Code is on GitHub.

Bangin’

Daniel Jeffries’ wildly popular Learning AI If You Suck At Math series is back after a 3-year hiatus. In part 8, Daniel asks (and answers) the question: Can AI make beautiful music?

Music Time brings the power of the Spotify player to your code editor. Control your music, view and create playlists, favorite and repeat songs, and discover new music without context switching to the Spotify web or desktop app.

Music Time is free and works with VS Code, Atom, and JetBrains IDEs. Some of its features require Spotify premium, but the personalized song recommendations work with the free version of Spotify as well. It even has a cool vizualizer so you can see your most productive songs.

Musicians and developers go together like peas and carrots, Jenny. So it makes sense that techniques used by musicians to hone their skills might transfer over to software people. One of those techniques is the “masterclass”

A masterclass is a format in which musicians perform a work for an established artist and the artist then gives them feedback rather like a lesson, except that all of this happens in front of an audience.

Click through for a compelling distillation of what software teams can learn from musicians when it comes to giving and receiving feedback.

What does this have to do with coding, you ask? Ambient music, IMHO, is the best music to code to. I’ve been enjoying this list ever since it hit my radar the other day, so I thought I’d pass it along.

A fascinating review of Dat and the Beaker Browser after building a decentralized Muxtape clone called Duxtape. Here’s a taste:

The roots of ‘view source’ live on, in an incredibly realized form. (In Beaker, you can right-click on Duxtape and ‘view source’ for the entire app. You can do this for your mixtapes, too. Question: When was the last time you inspected the code hosting your Webmail, your blog, your photo storage? Related question: When was the first time?)

It’s hard to see a world where apps like this get mainstream adoption. On the other hand, what other choices do we have? 🤔

This site is a collection of generative music pieces which can be listened to. The term “generative music” has been used especially by Brian Eno to describe music which changes continuously and is created by a system. Such systems often generate music for as long as one is willing to listen.

Push play and code away.

JS Party panelist, Feross Aboukhadijeh:

In the days of Geocities and Angelfire, a quirky HTML tag called ⟨bgsound⟩ enabled sound files to play in the background of webpages. Usually, these files were in the MIDI format. What a glorious era that was! Sadly, ⟨bgsound⟩ has been removed from browsers and MIDI is obscure and hard to play back. In this talk, we’ll bring MIDI and ⟨bgsound⟩ back from the dead using WebAssembly, Emscripten, Web Audio, and Web Components. When we’re finished, you’ll be able to give your webpages the 90’s treatment in a modern, standards-compliant way!

NESTED LOOPS is a JavaScript band that combines music and video with web tech to perform live at JSConf. In this episode, Jerod and Suz are joined by Jan Monschke and Kahlil Lechelt, which comprise 2/3 of the group.

After sampling one of their tracks, we hear the story of how they got the band together, the journey of building a tech stack for their first live performance, and how that stack was then rewritten to be “good” for their second performance. Suz is at awe with the technologies at play. Jerod wonders if there’s room in the world for musicians directly targeting JavaScript devs. A good time is had by all.

Where does Feross get all those wonderful toys? He builds them with JavaScript, of course! BitMidi – a website for listening to your favorite MIDI files – is his latest creation. In this episode, Jerod “sits down” with Feross to learn all about it.

How do MIDIs even work? Why won’t they play on the web anymore? Can WASM save the day (hint: yes)? How does Feross get so many eyeballs on his creations? Is Preact awesome for building sites like this? What’s the future of BitMidi look like? Don’t ask us, listen to the episode!

JS Party podcast host Feross built a new web app – BitMidi – for listening to free MIDI songs. It’s a historical archive of MIDI files from the early web era. This post breaks down why and how he built the site.

Oh, and since you’re probably wondering, the answer is “Yes, there are hundreds of Zelda songs on BitMidi!”

Jordan Eldredge has been working hard to make Webamp even more rad:

Take a trip down memory lane with this faithful WebGL port of MilkDrop, the iconic music Winamp visualizer.

Check it out in Chrome and Firefox. What should you listen to while the visualizer does its thing? Our episode all about Webamp, of course. 🤓

Like JSFiddle, but for ChordPro chord sheets. I’m no musician, so I’m not embarrassed to say I had to google to learn ChordPro is an ASCII text file format for transcribing songs with chords and lyrics.

ChordFiddle is loaded with features and has more coming on the project board. Look under the hood and you’ll find two more open source libs: ChordSheetJS and ChordJS.