I own all of it — and eight years of music still wasn't getting finished.
Songs were dying in three places, so I built three tools — one for each.
01AudioDex — the catalog
Twenty thousand scattered recordings, read by sound, named, and made playable.
the problem Twenty thousand files. Four drives, iCloud, the Voice Memos vault, friends' DMs. No master list, no way to even ask what's in here.
the sweep Every file read by sound, fingerprinted, and flown into the bin it actually belongs in. Watch the pile become a shape.
deduped Same take, three names. The catalog hears that they are identical and folds the copies away. Twenty groups, gone.
a catalog Twenty thousand two hundred seventy nine files, read and filed. Every tool I own assumes you already know what you have — now I do. Audio 14.m4a is in Tracks, waiting.
Fire the kiln on the selected voice memo to forge its catalog entry.
Pure field capture. Twenty minutes of a city waking up before the cars take it over. No part to keep, but the low hum underneath would bed a pad beautifully.
0:00[wind across the mic]
4:12[a train, far off]
11:50…first cars.
18:30[one bird, three notes, close]
A phone memo, recorded once at 2am, never re-recorded. The audio is rough and it does not matter: the take is the song. Filed, titled, and kept so it could actually get finished.
0:00…okay, just play it, don't fix it.
0:41…head to toe, that's the line.
1:12[humming the next part]
1:31…leave it. that's the one.
Not a song. Me talking through a fix for a track I'd left half-open: pull everything but the vocal for two bars before the last chorus. Filed so I'd actually find it again.
0:03okay, the bridge. the bridge is too much.
0:19drop it out. just the vocal, two bars, right before the last chorus.
0:35then slam back in. that's the move. don't forget this one.
02Signal Studio — the workshop
Where a found sound becomes an instrument, and an instrument becomes a track idea.
Ableton is the finish line. Nothing owned the starting line — the two a.m. minute between an idea and a playable groove.
Built first as the instrument on this site's homepage — then it refused to stay a toy.
always rolling — the jam is never lost. drag across a lane to grab a loop.
blocks snap to bars — build the idea, then ship it.
Any instrument with a MIDI port can become a voice — the studio plays it, samples the return, velocity and all.
Four bars I'd keep — an idea that now deserves finishing. send it to the engineer ↓
03Richard — the engineer
The last step — and the live frontier: an engineer that develops the more it gets used.
LANDR and Ozone ship one fixed opinion about better. This one is growing its own — blind round by blind round.
Version one was going to learn my taste from a million votes and become the best engineer in the world. That fantasy died honestly — what it left behind is a test I can't cheat, feeding an engine that develops through use. Take a round yourself:
Sound on. You're the judge here. Listen blind, then crown one.
1…3 switch · hold or enter to ♛ crown · R reveal · space play
every take is loudness-matched — otherwise the loudest one always wins. there is no wrong crown, only taste.
n_votes: 8warmth: −0.02air: 0.00density: −0.008restraint: +0.205note: job 219 — picked raw over treatments → +restraintnote: job 222 — chose 'clean'
an editable file, not a model — I can read it, argue with it, overrule it
Its strongest leaning so far is restraint — the default is to do nothing:
Only a safe ceiling. Nothing tonal — the default does nothing.
Found in a junk drawer. Played like a band. Judged blind. Finished.
The system never made a note — it just kept this one alive long enough to become a song.