alt Hacker NewsIt's interesting I briefly thought about getting into "live coding" or Strudel (or Sonic Pi), this kind of thing where you write code to produce music
But as a non-music person and developer I'd rather use an interface like Ableton where you see separate tracks/times line up kind of thing... but aside from that I ended up just getting a music subscription service that you can use in your YT videos which is what I was after.
Everything is a time sink it seems, gotta choose where you put your time into if 40 hrs of your life is taken up by day job already.
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Ultimately I prefer Ableton too, as it’s just much more polished, but there is merit to music-as-code. Traditional DAWs, which are based on traditional instrument interfaces, have incredible amount of state, which is so easy to get lost in. It’s so much easier to learn something new from a code snippet, than from a YouTube tutorial which shows a series of state changes via clicks and keyboard shortcuts.
Max/MSP (or Pure Data) ended up being a good middle ground for me. With that said, it's easy to get lost in the coding and forget to make music, if that is the ultimate goal. I also found that more complex patches trend towards approximating features of a DAW, at which point the downsides (single-core, no timeline) make the whole undertaking a bit questionable.
I spent about a month developing a custom UI and comprehensive control environment for my modular only to immediately abandon it and return to Ableton.
Max for Live, on the other hand...