lmms VS openlibrary

So, I saw the other day the release of the ep-133, and it happens that I want to get started doing that kind of stuff (e.g., creating simple beats). I have zero knowledge about DAW/sampling and music in general (my background is in soft. engineering), so the first thing that I searched on Google is "open source daw" and I found LMMS (https://lmms.io/). I'm going through the documentation right now.

Do you know which kind of books/articles/blogs I can follow to get started in this world of DAW? I would like to get the fundamentals first and then start experimenting (e.g., not sure if the analogy is correct, but "it's like I don't want to learn JavaScript, but I want to learn data structures, algorithms and programming in general")

# Topic 2: Dasher + Guitar Hero style music theory/improvisation practice program

Back "on topic": I remember being quite enamoured/fascinated by dasher when I first encountered it. It's quite a unique interaction paradigm with the constant "forward movement" and "intelligent" pre-filtering/constraint of options with size-based prioritization.

Your suggestion to extend this interaction style for use in the music theory domain immediately appealed to me, as it intersects with some musical things I've been thinking about/playing with recently.

Over the past couple of years I've been playing around with ("rules based" rather than ML) procedural music generation primarily in the context of games.

This has been motivated by a couple of things: partly a procgen project is helpful as a driver for gaining an deeper understanding of music theory which I would like to develop for my own composition/production; and, I'm really interested in exploring ways of providing people with the experience of actually composing/creating their own music--which is something I think many people perceive as something only "musicians"/"composers" can do.

The latter is driven my own music composition/creation/education experience: I learned piano as a kid for about a year until it was "mutually agreed" that if I wasn't going to practice perhaps it would be best to stop. :D But I've always really enjoyed music, particularly electronic/dance/EDM, and wanted to also create it & not just consume it--over the years I played around a tiny amount with creating some but gravitated toward DJing as my primary means of musical expression.

Then a few years ago I started "more seriously" creating tracks with LMMS (a FLOSS DAW https://lmms.io) and while progress was slow it was still nice to be able to enjoy the results.

But I grew frustrated/dissatisfied by the fact that I didn't really know how to add more of a melodic component to my music. (I'm an Anthemic Trance guy from way back. :D )

Over a couple of years after butting my head up against Music Theory a few times and bouncing off again (not unlike my experience with Rust :D ) one day I suddenly somehow "saw" some of the (simplified) Music Theory patterns/rules that I'd not internalised/understood previously.

And then I could add melody to my tracks! :o I mean they weren't masterpieces but it sounded like music! It blew my mind. :)

Not long after I realised something I found quite profound: it felt like music, instrument skills & music theory had only ever been presented to me as a thing that you did so you could play other people's music but I never wanted to play other people's music, I wanted to create my own!

Which then triggered a period of "Why didn't anyone teach me years ago when I was a kid that you could create your own music by starting with a few simple rules & building on them? Here I was "many" years later voluntarily learning about music theory, trying to apply it and even practising scales! :o

Anyway, that experience made me wonder if other people have experienced music & its creation in the same way and what opportunities there might be (particularly within a game/casual context) to provide those people with their first taste of creating music through a "guided" experience of just playing (in both senses of the word).

So, yeah, the "Guitar Dasher"/"Piano Dasher" concept aligns quite nicely with that. :)

Not that anyone asked me. :D

Couple of related things:

* Your suggestion also reminded me of another FLOSS DAW I played around with called Helio which has a "chord tool" (https://docs.helio.fm/tips-and-tricks.html#chord-tool) which appears as a pie-menu pre-populated with chords that fit with the current scale/root. I seem to recall that there are commercial DAWs that also have a similar UI.

* While I'm not particularly happy with its current state (really need to upload the most recent version of the code, which I'm fractionally happier with) here's my first foray into music procgen for a game jam entry (with a "debug quality UI" for controlling the output), if you're interested in checking it out: https://rancidbacon.itch.io/the-conductor

* And from a different angle here's another game jam entry where the concept I was playing with was essentially using music theory concepts as the basis for creating combat interactions/patterns (e.g. "Oh, no, how am I going to harmonize with whatever that was that the boss just played?!") and it all takes place on the "Grand Staff"/"Great Stave": https://rancidbacon.itch.io/stave-off

(Unfortunately as often seems to be the case I ended up spending more time fighting with a Unicode music engraving font/standard than I did writing game play for that last one. :) )

Of course, you need some kind of DAW software in your PC that receives MIDI (from LPK), creates the audio data and sends them to Volt. If you have zero experience with this, start with some kind of simple and self-contained DAW, like e.g. "LMMS" (free download). Later you can graduate to more complex (and expensive) DAWs and separate VST plugins.

song made in lmms by me

For music making, it kind of depends on what you use normally but LMMS is a decent free DAW.

Give a try to Ardour, LMMS, MusE and Rosegarden.

LMMS

I'd like to make a pitch for Openlibrary.org the free online library from Internet Archive that includes a fulltext search of millions of books.

I've been volunteering with them on and off for several years and it's always a lovely experience. Their backend is python and frontend mostly from python templates and some Vue for librarian stuff.

Every Tuesday they have a call on Zoom that everyone is welcome to join to share what they're working on, ask for help, and generally chat a bit. It's a great time.

Depending on what you're interested in there's a lot to do from helping build import pipelines for more book entries, writing bots to cleanup data, Performance improvements, better documenting public APIs, etc

I'm currently slowly working on a wikidata integration for their authors page. We also could use some help upgrading to Vue 3, mentors for Google summer of code would be helpful, find of ML projects needing help, moving away from old jQuery libraries, etc.

They can be quite responsive to PRs too like I blogged about here: https://blog.rayberger.org/idea-to-merged-in-less-than-30-mi...

For example, here's a small issue that could use some help on the python side: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/8928

OpenLibrary does provide search access to full texts. For example: https://openlibrary.org/search/inside?q=%22institutional+thi...

It is open source and they're always looking for contributors. I think they'd especially welcome help improving search!

https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/

Check out https://openlibrary.org. You can search ´library science’, librarian’, etc, and something should come up. Just select the ‘ebooks’ option to search for items within the collection. And you can narrow the search by subject, etc.

Right now I'm in the middle of the chicken and the egg problem where we don't have enough authors cataloging their publications and b/c of that obviously readers are not interested in using the site.

I've gone back and forth with taking Open Libray's [0] catalog as that would at least flesh out our collection of books but then I'd have to deal with verifying authors to accounts so they can access their books. Which sounds like a major headache and also just defeats the concept of building a community.

Since this is really a weekend project, I'm just going to keep building the tools out to perfection and hope people will trickle in over time.

Luckily for me I just want to write, so the tools I'm building are exactly what works for my writing goals and I think overtime others will find the same value.

[0] https://openlibrary.org

Here's one: https://openlibrary.org/

The Internet Archive runs what they call the Open Library, which is a unique concept on the traditional library. You can sign-up with minimal details and digitally check out many scanned books from libraries all over the world. The only caveat is that almost all of the books are older editions - ones that would be impossible to find locally. It's great if you're looking for old routes, a look back in time, details about obscure areas, or just prefer to read a book rather than browse AllTrails. Please do still support local authors whenever you can as guidebooks take hundreds of hours to create and are slowly going extinct.

Repo : https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary

I want to clarify that I'm a non-US citizen, so accessing physical copies from US libraries or buying it from Amazon might not be feasible for me. To give you some context, my personal research was guided by the wiki section of r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH (https://www.reddit.com/r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH/wiki/reading/). I've conducted research using various online resources, including the Ebook & Open Source/Access Libraries such as Sci-Hub, Z-Library, Library Genesis, Anna’s Archive, and PDF Drive. Additionally, I've checked Torrent Search Engines like The Pirate Bay and BTDigg. Moreover, I've searched in Internet Archive and its Open Library but again I had no luck. However, I haven't yet explored software-based libraries. Finally I've looked into the Ebay if anyone had the particular book but it looks like both the versions are quite rare, because the book was meant to be only for Pharmarcist and especially for American ones.