One of my esteemed professors from Santa Monica College, Dr. Driscoll asked for an opinion on how one can use a sheet of music and reshuffle some measures to generate a unique exercise for each student. This turned out more fun than anticipated and here’s a solution I came up with using the free notation […]

Finally managed to cobble together an index page for the bunch of tools I’ve been hacking on in the past year as I progress through my music education. Is it better UX than the Apache default file listing? Hmm… Say hello to onlinemusictools.com! Not the best domain name, I know. But everything is bloody taken […]

Update: Now in French too Update 2: and in German Update 3: now with Web Speech API (scroll to the bottom) Here’s a little app that gives you flashcards of Italian words used in music: https://www.onlinemusictools.com/italiano/ It also pronounces the words in four different voices. The code for the tool: https://github.com/stoyan/italiano A few implementation notes […]

Yesterday I had to plug in my keyboard to the computer and wasn’t sure if it was working. How do I test? Well, I had to look up an older post, copy and paste some code to the console… what a drag. I though it would be cool to have a page where you can […]

Here’s my new tool called intervals Play with it here. Learn about the theory behind it here. The code for the tool. What does it do? Generates a random music interval, shows it on the musical staff. You try to guess it. Clicking on the staff reveals the answer. You can also play the interval. […]

Inspired by this talk by Jean-Philippe Côté I saw at Web Unleashed in Toronto last month, I thought I should dust off the old midi cable. MIDI? MIDI is a protocol that various music and lighting devices use to talk to each other. Believe it or not v1.0 of the spec from 1983 is still […]

Another one of those… This time it’s set to the music of “Gremmie outta control” by The silly surfers, covered by Pearl Jam And this time I’ve added some chords for your entertainment… C….. C Every team has a clown who thinks he knows it all (personal commitment to excellence that good enough is not […]

Here’s a video I made to raise awareness about Anaconda Limousine’s first album (where I play guitar and co-wrote 1 song): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LavyKbSuvI. This is a post that explains how it was made so if anyone wants to made a similar one, they can have something to step on. Turns out videos like this are called […]

Say, a bunch of .wav files to .mp3 $ for f in *.wav; do ffmpeg -i $f “${f%.*}.mp3”; done

Traditions are traditions. Marry Christmas with a new cover, this time it’s Deck the Halls: Deck the halls (part one) (It’s only part one because I didn’t find the time to properly record what I had in mind – another 7/8th cover like last year. But you can hear the idea at the end) Here […]

Live input, aka getUserMedia: it exists in Chrome Canary for audio too. Great times to be a web developer, right? Let’s check it out. Here’s the demo, but first a prerequisite: go chrome://flags, search for “Web Audio Input” and enable it. Restart Chrome Canary. With a guitar I wanted to have a little trickier setup […]

How about generating some noise in JavaScript? Demo is here: oscillator. How does this work? Using HTML Web Audio you can synthesize audio with a given frequency. E.g. 440Hz is A (“la” in solfège) This means you don’t need an <audio> element or any mp3, ogg, wav, etc, no external files. Let’s see how. Capable […]

I’m part of a band that has an album out now. I know, right? (links: excuse-for-a-site, amazon, itunes). I wanted to put up all the songs on the site, but seems like there’s a little dissonance in the band whether this is a good idea. Plan B: 30s samples. Like the bigwigs do on Amazon […]

I put up a few MP3s on http://anacondalimousine.com, in simple a hrefs. While modern browsers will let you click and display some sort of player in a new page, why not play them in-page without a refresh? Simple enough. Plus we have HTML5 audio. Problem is, old IEs don’t support HTML5 audio and you need […]

Here’s a cover of We Wish You a Merry Christmas I just did. It’s in a Bulgarian (and other Balkan countries) style in 7/8 tempo (and 9/8th at one place). This is me channeling my inner Goran Bregovich 🙂 We Wish You a Merry Christmas (7/8th and 9/8th) Continuing the tradition (why did I skip […]

#2 This post is part of the Velocity countdown series. Stay tuned for the last one tomorrow. With only 2 days to Velocity, it’s time to drop in the quality of these posts (but the one tomorrow will be great, I promise) with today’s announcement of the immediate availability of the project called http://sultansofspeed.com. I […]

Excuse me, my dearest reader for subjecting you to this (*cough vogon poetry*). My only excuse is it’s Friday. So here comes another one of those. This time a coverlet (a whatlet?) of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Tin Pan Alley (The Roughest Place in Town). Tin Pan Alley sounds almost like Silicon (Silly Con?) Valley 🙂 […]

Another “brilliant” idea that I had recently – how about combining audio files into a single file to reduce HTTP requests, just like we do with CSS sprites? Then use the audio APIs to play only selected parts of the audio. Unlike pretty much all brilliant ideas I have, I decided to search for this […]

We don’t need no docum’ntation We don’t need no source control No dark sarcasm on the mail(ing) list Ninjas leave them kids alone No comments – code should speak alone! All in all it’s just another LOC We don’t need no code conventions We don’t need no (js)lint control No YSlow rules, no validation And […]

Disregarding my dear wife’s opinion that the best present to my blog readers would be to *not* publish my new recording…. I’ll just go ahead and do it: Feliz Navidad ’tis a heavy metal sort of cover of Jose Feliciano’s Feliz Navidad. I hope you like Iron Maiden and Helloween (there’s a special treat between […]

As you know yours truly is a guitar hero wannabe. So I’m playing with the idea of recording a song/video called “Give PiNG a Chance”, cover of “Give peace a chance”. Hopefully whoever hears it will then think twice before saving a GIF instead of PNG. Imagine. And the web will be as one… 😀 […]

ffmpeg is such an amazing tool, looks like it’s for video what ImageMagick is for images. An all-powerful all-formats wicked cool command-line tool. This blog post is an introduction to some of the MP3 capabilities of ffmpeg. I’ll use ffmpeg to transform a blog post into a podcast-ready mp3 file. If you continue to read […]

Best wishes to everyone! Here’s a rendition of Jingle Bells I recorded today (kinda punky and heavily inspired by Pearl Jam’s 2007 Christmas single). Enjoy. » Jingle-Bells.mp3

Today was officially my first day at my new job at in Yahoo! Search. In the spirit of less-is-more I’m stepping out of the position of improving the performance of all Yahoo’s sites worldwide to improving the performance of just one Yahoo! Search – in the US first, then maybe helping globally. I’m excited by […]

It’s been interesting few days lately for me, celebrity-wise. Agassi/Graff First, last Thursday, Andre Agassi and his wife Steffi Graff came to the Yahoo! center in Santa Monica (my workplace) and played with our kids and signed tennis balls. This was fun, check out: vid, vid, vid, pics. Here’s my daughter almost hitting the ball: […]