Hacker News: octetta

New comment by octetta in "Show HN: Web-REPL "skred" : my OSS sound engine w/retro C64 appearance"

octetta — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:14:29 +0000

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 "skred" : my OSS sound engine w/retro C64 appearance

octetta — Sun, 10 May 2026 19:54:15 +0000

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 out the tooling.

I gave a lightning talk on the ASCII notation at ElixirConf EU last month here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnJ0osgiqWM

There's a work-in-progress tutorial for the notation used in this tool at:

https://octetta.github.io/pulp/doc/learn.html

and a long-winded YT video of me showing a bit at:

https://youtu.be/_wNQ24EJKa0

I'll be showing this stuff off at the Audio Developer Conference in Tokyo June 2nd 2026.

https://adcjapan26.sched.com/event/2KCdr/beeps-and-ports-ann...

If you're there and you're an audio developer (I'm not), I'd sure like feedback and guidance.

Oh, one other thing, a side-project that I showed here last month (k-synth) IS embedded here but that documentation is yet to be written.

You can read about that project at:

https://github.com/octetta/k-synth

and there's also a web-UI for that tool to learn the weirdo-API-ish notation here

https://octetta.github.io/k-synth/

Have fun, be nice.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48087236

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

WASM-skred-REPL a web playground for my work-in-progress sound engine

octetta — Sun, 10 May 2026 19:48:37 +0000

Article URL: https://octetta.github.io/doc

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48087178

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by octetta in "Ghostling"

octetta — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 19:13:19 +0000

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?

New comment by octetta in "Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?"

octetta — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 12:47:11 +0000

Many updates... if you're still watching this, try it out here:

https://octetta.github.io/k-synth

New comment by octetta in "Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?"

octetta — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 13:40:39 +0000

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.

New comment by octetta in "Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?"

octetta — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 11:49:56 +0000

that's what i'm playing with... thoughts?

New comment by octetta in "Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?"

octetta — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:22:24 +0000

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.

New comment by octetta in "Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?"

octetta — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 18:42:06 +0000

I'm looking forward to checking out your stuff...

New comment by octetta in "Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?"

octetta — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 18:40:58 +0000

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!

New comment by octetta in "Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?"

octetta — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 18:23:29 +0000

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.

New comment by octetta in "Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?"

octetta — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 18:15:22 +0000

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.

New comment by octetta in "Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?"

octetta — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 17:57:55 +0000

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?

New comment by octetta in "Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?"

octetta — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 17:50:37 +0000

Wowie! I'M NOT WORTHY! Cool stuff!

New comment by octetta in "Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?"

octetta — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 17:35:37 +0000

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!!!

New comment by octetta in "Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?"

octetta — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 17:31:25 +0000

Wow! I had no idea, will look here for inspiration too. Thanks!

New comment by octetta in "Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?"

octetta — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:59:30 +0000

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.

New comment by octetta in "Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?"

octetta — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:55:57 +0000

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.

New comment by octetta in "Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?"

octetta — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:41:30 +0000

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.

New comment by octetta in "Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?"

octetta — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 15:56:29 +0000

Wowie... Jart commented! I'm on it my friend. Certainly sequencing is a good thing to add.