Four projects from one developer: a studio rack, a jazz practice lab, a recording transcriber and the private setup behind an AI agent.
By day I build websites and systems for clients. At night I build the software I can't buy: a studio, a practice room, a transcriber and an agent that never sleeps. Below is each one, how it works and what it's made of.
Counted from the working software, not from a plan for it.
Instruments, effects and utilities in a patchable virtual rack.
Each one analysed bar by bar, with key changes marked.
Vocals, drums, bass, guitar, piano and the rest, pulled from one recording.
Pengo, a studio rack on a real-time audio engine.
Jazz Lab breaks down jazz standards. Audio to Score turns recordings into draft tab.
Hermes, an agent that runs scheduled jobs and waits for my yes.
Every build starts with something I wanted and couldn't buy. I write the one sentence it has to do, and nothing goes in that doesn't serve it.
REQUIREMENT LOCKED
Rust where timing matters, Python where it's quicker to be right. Real audio and real jazz standards, never placeholder data.
ENGINE RUNNING
I measure the output against human work and make the tool say how far to trust itself. Then I test it until it won't break.
LIVE IN USE
Nothing here was designed to be sold. That freedom is why each one is so specific about what it's for.
"If I can build it, then I will understand better how it works."
Using a tool is the quickest way to find what's wrong with it, and that list is what I work on next.
Pengo, Jazz Lab, Audio to Score and Hermes.
Pengo is a rack-based mini-DAW. Virtual hardware you patch together with cables, a sequencer with a piano roll, and a console mixer. Every line of code, every faceplate and every sound in it is original.
Jazz Lab opens a standard, reads the harmony bar by bar, draws the chord-scale on the fretboard and plays a rhythm section that follows the form. I built it to get as good at this repertoire as I am at development.
Take a recording, find the guitar solo in it and get a draft tab to open in TuxGuitar. Or pull the band apart and mix it so you can hear a line clearly enough to learn it by ear.
Hermes is an open-source agent. What I built is everything around it: the sealed server it lives on, the jobs it runs while I sleep, and the approval gate that stops it publishing anything without a human yes.
If I stop opening a tool, it goes back on the bench.
A tool that guesses should say so. Audio to Score reports how far to trust its own tab.
The three apps run on my own computer. The agent sits on a private network with no public ports.
Anything that leaves the building waits for a person to say yes.
Every premium custom build I take on starts at the level of this one.
