Minimusic 1

I thought I'd bring an older project out from the archives and share it with you. This one is from 2019.

Back in 2005, a group called FM3 made a little box that played infinite music loops, with nine tracks built in. They called it the Buddha Machine.

I thought this was so cool. Minimalist, entrancing, limitless. I was hooked. Brady and I even had a few Buddha Machines around at our wedding reception.

There's something really magical about it. We're so used to music being finite: a song, an album. Even with never-ending algorithmic playlists, there's something special about music that goes on forever.

I'm also a sucker for things that mess with our assumptions and typical patterns. The status quo can pretty much always use a good shaking.

Anyway, at some point I realized that I could make a little web player for loops, just like the Buddha Machine:

Each colored button plays a different loop, all played and recorded by me on an OP-1.

Paid Monorail subscribers: you can check it out at mmx1.monorail.tech. (If you haven't subscribed yet, or if you're on the free tier, you can become a paid subscriber here.)

Under the hood

Just making a looping mp3 player would have been enough, but I wanted to push things a little further. I was thinking a lot about cassettes, game cartridges, and floppy disks at the time, and this informed a new challenge: How self contained could it be, how compact, how portable?

This player is actually a single html file with zero dependencies. The mp3s are converted to base64-encoded text, and are right there in the inline JavaScript.

If you click the download link, it'll save a local version to your computer, which you can open up and play whenever, forever. As an extra bonus, it's 1.3MB–small enough to fit on a floppy disk.

I hope you like it.

Oh, and you can get the reissued Buddha Machine, too, if you want.