have a great hack day all,looking forward to see if any new awesome tools would get released after this
Hey S-N-S!! where have you been all these years? btw the hack day is already past tense for a lustrum 
not really sure what you mean by where have i been all these years,but my net has been down the last half month though,and been very busy making new music
I was just teasing you. The new music part is the good news.
(perhaps being locked away from the net is the best way to get productable)
hehe thats alrigt,besides the no net thing,i am in the middle of upgrading my home studio,so my working area has been a mess,and i have noticed when all is messy i have a harder time being productive
but yeah it has actually helped alot not having internet connection
It was definitely a fun place to hang out and it was nice to meet a few people, but I personally did not feel inspired to actually hack anything there. I attended most of the workshops and API presentations by the other companies, and it was very interesting to see what everyone had to say, but nothing genuinely grabbed my attention to be honest. There was a lot of cool technology being demo’ed - the stuff from Liine in particular was very nifty indeed - but as for the API presentions it felt to me like most of the guys were essentially pitching the same idea: some web-based service that analyses music or musical trends, shows how popular certain artists are, how many plays they get, how artists/bands are related and connected somehow, etc. All that stuff is very cool if you want to build the next Pandora or Spotify, or some other quirky web-based tool to gather stats and present them in a weird way, but I couldn’t personally imagine myself building a truly unique tool based on those APIs.
I had a few random ideas in my head, but nothing that I felt particularly compelled to work on. I considered trying to make an algorithmic music generation tool in Renoise that would use the API data as some kind of seed value, but that felt like a bit of a cop-out to me. If all I’m doing with the API data is using it as a source of numbers that I feed into an unrelated algorithm, then I could have just as easily pulled numbers from a weather service API, or from the time tables of public transport, or from any number of other available feeds out there. So overall it seemed rather pointless to use the API data just for that purpose. Other people did find some cool things to do with the APIs, so it’s probably just a personal thing I guess, since I haven’t been feeling very inspired lately.
Anyway, for the Renoise “workshop” we were only given 30 minutes to present Renoise and try to get people interested. The idea was to give some kind of introduction to Renoise for about 15 minutes, and then use the remaining 15 minutes to show some scripting basics and get some feedback from the audience. The intro talk ran slightly longer than we expected, and by that point it was a bit too late to show anything really meaningful that demonstrated the potential of the scripting API. Eduard demo’ed a couple of tools like the drum processor and managed to get some laughs from the crowd with amusing random drum patterns, but overall the whole thing felt like quite a tough sell in my opinion.
It also didn’t help matters that we were basically talking to a tiny percentage of the overall crowd. I think there were around 20 people who showed up for the Renoise workshop, and the other workshops also suffered from similarly low numbers. Generally speaking, it seemed like most people at Hack Day had already made up their minds about what they would be hacking, and so they didn’t really care too much about the workshops, but who knows really.
Maybe some of what we said simply went over peoples’ heads, or maybe they just weren’t very interested in the first place, I’m not sure. We did get a couple of people asking a few questions about Renoise after the talk (and while hanging out in the main area), and even a few guys who already knew a bit about trackers or had used them in the past, but overall I got the impression that nobody was really interested in using Renoise for any hack day projects. One thing’s for sure: Ableton Live + Max is definitely the familiar weapon of choice for most of these guys. Pretty much everyone else doing some kind of presentation was using Live and Max as their main platform, and I saw people using Live quite a lot in the main event area.
I went home early Saturday evening after having dinner at a nearby restaurant with Eduard and Erik, but I did not go back on Sunday for the rest of the event. Without any inspiration to hack something myself, I simply did not feel like sticking around for the whole thing. Overall, I would like to have seen more hacks/ideas relating to actual music creation and manipulation, rather than so much (apparent) focus on web APIs.
Amen to that !!
Seen and be seen. No, it’s not a typo. Seen?
I was following on the social networks. It looked pretty cool to me. Obviously a lot of web presence, but that was given IMHO. The point I think is just to flex and deliver.
For me all of this is interesting because there’s talk of doing a Montreal Music Hack Day. Being Montreal, it will probably have a very different vibe.
Fingers crossed something happens. Thanks for opening the door!
You could have demonstrated Bantai’s web scripts to control Renoise from the Web But that would probably have been just as intriguing as the rest of the workshop demo’s.
Yep, we definitely should have demo’ed this (especially considering that other crews were showing tools that could control Live from an iPad app and stuff like that). I did also name-drop his HTTP library a few times to enforce the idea that Renoise could be connected to these other web APIs, but overall we were simply rushed for time and a bit unprepared. 30 minutes just isn’t enough to explain what the hell Renoise is and then also show the wide range of things it’s capable of.
30 minutes is not enough time, but you should have introduced yourself in 1 min. and then just let keith303 track the next 29. 
