I took Dave’s “Write a compiler” course several years ago, and it was mind-blowing in the absolute best sense of the term. What a great teacher and person.
Programmers are worse off for his retirement, but (given his career change) Chicago-area high school kids are in for a real treat.
I also make instrumental music, and I have this same problem. What I do is: find a word or phrase that matches the rhythmic phrasing of my main melody. That becomes the working title.
An example is how Paul McCartney’s original title for “Yesterday” was “Scrambled Eggs,” since those words fit naturally over the start of the melody.
I'm a very happy Google Closure Compiler user, especially with the "advanced optimizations" flag. It does a level of code elimination and variable renaming at a level that no other JavaScript tool even approaches. Excellent software.
I think it gets a bad rap because you need to write your code in a certain way to avoid the optimizations breaking things. But if you're a disciplined developer, you'll reap some large benefits.
I've been working on it full-time since 2012, so it's hard for me to reduce 14 years' worth of work to a single "most difficult technical step."
Sorry, I don't mean to be rude or unhelpful, but that's not a question I can provide a meaningful answer to. There have been dozens, probably hundreds, of difficult technical challenges in building Soundslice.
I’ve transcribed hundreds of hours of guitar music over 25+ years, using the method described in this article. It was such a slog that I ended up creating tool to help streamline the process: Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/).
It combines audio playback directly with a tab editor, so that you can immediately write down what you’ve figured out and your transcription stays in sync with the original audio. This makes transcribing incredibly fast and (importantly) accurate.
It’s got audio slowdown, precise looping, “synth overlay” (playback of the transcription and original audio at the same time, to spot errors), auto stem separation and a full-featured tab/notation editor with support for hundreds of notations.
When you’re done, you get a very useful artifact: a synced transcription, effectively a bespoke practice environment for that piece of music.
Over the years, Soundslice has expanded into a lot more than a pure transcription tool, but lots of people still use it for its original intended purpose. (It supports any instrument that uses western music notation, not just guitar.) If you’re at all interested in transcribing music, give it a shot.
Hi, I make that site! We don't have any "basic effects like normalization/compression," so I think you may be mistaking us for something else?
Soundslice is oriented around sheet music that's synced with audio. So while we have a few audio-processing features (basic cropping, slowdown and fine-grained pitch correction), that stuff is all secondary to the notation aspect.
Thanks for sharing this. Your site is great. I've already learned a bunch of stuff, just browsing around the existing submissions.
I had a chuckle pondering whether you A/B tested "really freaking cool-looking" versus "really cool-looking" in the prompt. What a weird world we live in! :-)
Programmers are worse off for his retirement, but (given his career change) Chicago-area high school kids are in for a real treat.