tech/honourable mentions

Here is some software I use all the time for a variety of tasks. I think it’s nice to share, and as a way of giving recognition to what are mostly free open-source projects.

Research

  • Knowledge management and notes with Dendron
  • Citation and reference management with Zotero
  • Git for source control and version management

Composition

  • REAPER. My preference for a DAW due to the scripting interface.
  • Max. Less so now, but still finds its way into various musicking.
  • SuperCollider
  • FTIS. My own framework for corpus exploration and composition
  • HISSTools. Tools for convolution and IR processing.
  • Alex Harker Max Objects. Excellent set of Max objects for various tasks.
  • FrameLib. Frame-based processing in Max. I wrote the documentation builder for it and have contributed some other bits of code to the project.
  • MeldaPlugins. An amazing set of free plugins. I recommend it as a great part of one’s toolkit.
  • SoundHack. A very nice set of plugins. I am officially in love with compand++.
  • Limiter No. 6. A good mastering limiter.
  • ReaScripts help me to do various bespoke tasks in REAPER such as item manipulation, batch rendering and finding awful VST3s.

Web Development

  • Svelte, for creating reactive websites. Seriously - Svelte is amazing.
  • peaks.js draws all my audio waveforms on this website and provides lovely playback functionality
  • audiowaveform for making binary data out of audio files

Coding

  • VSCode. Although microsoft are certainly evil, VSCode is equally as pleasant to work with.
  • Python
  • Nim
  • Omni
  • lua

CLI Tools

  • fish. fish is what using the command line should be.
  • ripgrep. A replacement to grep that is fast and a pleasure to use.
  • fd. I lost it… I lost it… oh, fd found it.
  • zoxide helps me to zoom around my file system with lightning fingers.
  • pandoc for manipulating and munging formats to formats.
  • restic creates encrypted backups for all my perishable work.
  • kitty a really nice cross platform terminal.

Quality of life

  • LuLU for controlling what my computer talks to
  • Hammerspoon to help reduce friction where necessary. Scripts here
  • Rectangle, because window management in macOS is criminally bad by default
  • Karabiner Elements maps different shortcuts so I can use my keyboard how I want to (mainly disabling caps lock).

Gibgab

  • Telegram for talking to friends mostly.
  • Signal for talking to friends also, with a bit more privacy in mind.

Teaching