Show HN: Skred – my opinionated sound/pattern engine and live coding thingy
https://octetta.github.io/pulp/doc/show-hn-1.html
This is my noisy and ugly baby... but I love it...
octetta
Re:Cagire: Live Coding in Forth
on Sunday July 19, 2026 @02:39PM (#48970628)
Neato... I'm glad stuff like this exists in the world. I'm gonna steal some ideas for my own project (Skred). Thanks!
Re:Show HN: Skred – my opinionated sound/pattern engine and live codin...
on Sunday July 05, 2026 @07:24AM (#48793267)
My stupid github.io page loads the inline YT viewer about 50% of the time... don't know if it's a Central Europe problem or a ME problem...
Re:Show HN: Web-REPL for my OSS sound engine
on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @12:14PM (#48110325)
Thanks! Give it a try and let me know if it's usable... the learning page should give a bit of a start on my ASCII notation.
Show HN: Web-REPL for my OSS sound engine
https://octetta.github.io/pulp/doc/
I've been working on a C-based open source sound engine as part of a book project and wanted an approachable way for people to try it out without having to build anything.Through the magic of emscripten (which I'm totally amazed by) and miniaudio (which has given me new life late in my development career), and a smidge of vibe-coded HTML/JS (web-dev is not my jam), this page will let you try...
WASM-skred-REPL a web playground for my work-in-progress sound engine
This is amazing and might be exactly what I’m looking for my own weirdo retro tooling that sometimes needs to run over ssh but also expect a “GUI” experience… any metrics on the overhead this might add to, for instance to a hello world type program?
Re:Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K c...
on Friday March 20, 2026 @08:47AM (#47453784)
Many updates... if you're still watching this, try it out here:
Re:Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K c...
on Tuesday March 17, 2026 @09:40AM (#47412534)
It might not be obvious (and doesn’t work on my iPhone or iPad), but if you right click on pads with sounds loaded, you can mess with the pitch of sounds, rename them, and download a wav file for use elsewhere.
Re:Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K c...
on Monday March 16, 2026 @07:49AM (#47397778)
that's what i'm playing with... thoughts?
Re:Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K c...
on Monday March 16, 2026 @05:22AM (#47396726)
I fixed a few broken examples in the README.md file but I don't have the related readme.html file used in the web app getting automatically updated, so they're out of sync at the moment.
Re:Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K c...
on Sunday March 15, 2026 @02:42PM (#47390448)
I'm looking forward to checking out your stuff...
Re:Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K c...
on Sunday March 15, 2026 @02:40PM (#47390435)
Fun. I've lost count of the languages I've learned and gotten paid to use over the years, but it's mostly very exciting to add a new one to the list.
Haskell is one I haven't used yet. The closest I've come to that is a weekend fling with OCaml... much respect for the ML work though!
I hear you for the complexities in J though. I've intentionally limited k-synth to single letter upper case variables and the verbs are also one character... I might regret this at some point.
Have fun! It makes the world a better place!
Re:Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K c...
on Sunday March 15, 2026 @02:23PM (#47390244)
A warning... if you save a setup to JSON, it naively stores the generated waveforms put in slots and the notebook, so the files can become quiet large. I have a plan to just keep the code behind the waves and regenerate the waveforms at load time.
Re:Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K c...
on Sunday March 15, 2026 @02:15PM (#47390136)
On the C-side, I'm going to add a UDP listener to the code so I can send k-synth incantations live from Emacs (something I did for my skred program at the suggestion of an Emacs user).
Let me know if anyone wants to know about this when it's usable.
On the desktop app side, I use miniaudio (thank's Macron) so this is portable to the usual suspects.
I also made a single header file cross platform midi library which I have some devious plans for in this space. Stay tuned.
Re:Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K c...
on Sunday March 15, 2026 @01:57PM (#47389945)
Doesn't matter. Just happy people are doing weird stuff like this and appreciate the share.
I looked at a bunch of APL-ish implementations and kind of ran with the K-simple code (links on the repo).
What background do you come to J from? Another programming language? How do you like it?
Re:Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K c...
on Sunday March 15, 2026 @01:50PM (#47389870)
Wowie! I'M NOT WORTHY! Cool stuff!
Re:Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K c...
on Sunday March 15, 2026 @01:35PM (#47389687)
I'll take a look... it's probably not obvious, but the language engine is actually written in C and emscripten-ed to WASM, so I've already crossed several bridges to get this done.
Absolutely riff off this interface... would love to see what you can make. My stuff is MIT licensed, so tear it up!
On a side note, I was able to meet Sam Aaron of SonicPi / Tau5 at Goarmire back in September which was cool... he teased us with Super Collider in JS then and since, he's crossed the finish line on that stuff.
We live in amazing times! Have fun!!!
Re:Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K c...
on Sunday March 15, 2026 @01:31PM (#47389636)
Wow! I had no idea, will look here for inspiration too. Thanks!
Re:Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K c...
on Sunday March 15, 2026 @12:59PM (#47389275)
At any rate, in case it's hard to see, definitely try loading the dm-bell.ks patch, putting it in slot one so the melodic pad can play it... it's quick and dirty to see what's capable in a few keystrokes... although I'm sure the PD and ChucK and SC and ... wizards could put me to shame in a showdown, LOL.
Re:Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K c...
on Sunday March 15, 2026 @12:55PM (#47389237)
Strudel (and PureData, and ChucK, and SuperCollider, and AMY) are all great projects, but they weren't scratching my itch, so after I got laid off from a FAANG role, I rage/anxiety started writing code for stuff fun-ner than writing code for radios and routers and satellites... this is where my cortisol / dopamine lead me.
No disrespect to those other projects... all have been inspirational and are a heck of a lot more "respectable" than my playground code.
Re:Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K c...
on Sunday March 15, 2026 @12:41PM (#47389093)
BQN kicks-ass and I've spent hours listening to the Array Cast podcast while in SoCal traffic. I'll check his stuff out with an eye towards the audio stuff.
I'm an APL newb... while I've been writing code-for-cash forever (C, etc.) I've had a long-time interest in APL languages, but I'm just messing around after working on waveform generation for another sound project I have in the works (https://github.com/octetta/skred ... https://youtu.be/L5-3gBpJsAo?si=JdBlntzn4doY-c3s).
While I was working on this I remember the first book I saw in the public library on computer programming was about APL (probably sometime around 1976)... I didn't have access to a "real computer" for another year after that and no APL for decades, but some ideas stick around, LOL.
Re:Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K c...
on Sunday March 15, 2026 @11:56AM (#47388622)
Wowie... Jart commented! I'm on it my friend. Certainly sequencing is a good thing to add.
Re:Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K c...
on Sunday March 15, 2026 @11:55AM (#47388603)
I have a CLI and desktop versions on github (all MIT license)
https://github.com/octetta/k-synth https://github.com/octetta/ksynth-desktop/
it's been a blast to play with... and a great excuse to learn array languages
Re:Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K c...
on Sunday March 15, 2026 @11:42AM (#47388502)
thanks!
Re:Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K c...
on Sunday March 15, 2026 @11:42AM (#47388498)
i wimped out and just have the patches being loaded from my github repo. good suggestion though.
Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?
https://octetta.github.io/k-synth/
I built k-synth as an experiment to see if a minimalist, K-inspired array language could make sketching waveforms faster and more intuitive than traditional code. I’ve put together a web-based toolkit so you can try the syntax directly in the browser without having to touch a compiler:Live Toolkit: https://octetta.github.io/k-synth/If you visit the page, here is a quick path to an audio...
Re:Show HN: K-synth – A web-based array language playground for synth ...
on Friday March 13, 2026 @08:53AM (#47363833)
I should have humbly said: I know about AMY/Tulip, PureData, ChucK, SuperCollider and they are each AWESOME!... I just wanted to try something different while developing waveforms and drum samples for another project I'm working on.
Show HN: K-synth – A web-based array language playground for synth design
https://octetta.github.io/k-synth/
I built k-synth as an experiment to see if a minimalist, K-inspired array language could make sketching waveforms faster and more intuitive than traditional code. I’ve put together a web-based toolkit so you can try the syntax directly in the browser without having to touch a compiler:Live Toolkit: https://octetta.github.io/k-synth/If you visit the page, here is a quick path to an audio...
Re:Forth – is it still relevant?
on Sunday November 09, 2025 @05:37AM (#45864572)
Forth is so easy to learn… go for it!