Suddenly, a bunch of the producers I follow are buzzing about the music-mangling possibilities of Septabee, a free DAW for Linux and Windows developed "in secret" over "20,000 hours." And it looks like insane fun: a bonkers dataflow interface and "violently unfinished" early-access software available through an intentionally broken website that autoplays music and makes you hunt for the click zone like it's 1994.

There’s a cool new DAW that has a linux version. It’s really wacky! It’s not Libre but Free as in beer.

If you read the comments at the end of the article you can get more context on the development. LLMs are involved in it’s creation but I still think it’s an interesting project.

Here is video of a guy trying out Septabee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJGIw8E2BgM

  • bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    4 hours ago

    Hmm…i mean, fun, but is it good? Random generation isnt music to me. Also seems silly to use an llm (which destroys humanity and creativity and earth) to make a music program…why not just have the supercomputer make the same nonsense sounds, itll be the same thing.

    • SuperLallarnOPEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      The music isn’t randomly generated, you have to dial in a chain of synths. And there’s a MIDI pianoroll like other DAWs. Not sure what kind of random you’re refering to. At the end of the day it’s just a fun little project.

      It would be silly to use AI to make music, but not as silly to make a DAW. It replaces programming skills not musicianship.

      LLMs are not very environmentally friendly at the moment but they could theoretically be created without much harm to the earth. The investment in datacenters right now is going too fast is not regulated enough. However I’m gonna throw in a shameless red-herring here and say there are other things like animal agriculture are way bigger problems. But we should make eco-friendly LLMs too.

      Will AI destroy humanity? In the sense that they will replace basic reasoning and critical thinking skills, making humans dumber, yes. But we are not as close to armageddon as Musk and Altman say we are. They are bluffing. Remember the hacking incident? Then some guy quits openAI, goes on a media tour as a “whistleblower” then Altman and the other tech bros go on twitter in support of the whistleblower, saying he’s right… That never happens to whistleblowers, they are silenced not given a megaphone by the guys they are doing the whistleblowing on. OpenAI want the government to “regulate” the industry so no new competitors can enter the market. If the public think LLMs are almost smart enough to destroy the world (in maybe 10 years) they will just think, wow that’s really advanced tech we should keep our investments in that, number will probably go up for a while longer.

      And to be clear, I think the use of LLMs on this project made me a bit disappointed cause it would be cooler if it was not. Vibe-coding is definitely not a plus in my book but this projects used it and it still looked fun.