[audio nerd heavy post]
A couple weeks ago, my friend let me borrow his Teenage Engineering OP1 field.
I started playing with their destructive tape looper and drum samplers.
And then I started to look for cheaper hardware or VST alternatives - seriously nothing. Nothing that lets you easily overdub takes in a multitrack view. And no "immediate" samplers that let you record a blob of audio into them, and then chop them up and play with the sounds.
For the overdub thing, Reaper is the closest it gets, but it easily becomes super cumbersome. the take lanes start taking up space, trying to route audio is always a pain in any DAW (been making digital music for 20 years)
And the sampler? you would think there is something, but even Ableton has a clunky workflow with grabbing instinctive samples and snippets. The closest thing is Koala Sampler for iOS (great piece of kit - recommended!)
So I started to dabble in the dark arts of vibe coding to make a plugin or two. ended up with 3 reaper plugins (shipped), an iOS sampler app "Choppa" (submitted to app store), a mac app and vst (alpha available for sale)... in 8 days.
Huge disclaimer here that I am a software architect by trade, I understand audio engines and audio buffer manipulations, and I am one of those guys who is constantly building things, as I'm sure many of us are.
Still I am floored by the velocity that this new era of vibe coding brings to minds of a technical and creative blend.
Check out the free reaper plugins, the source code is on my github, too! Would love to hear what you think!
