Keygen.music
75 points by soupspaces 3 hours ago | 35 comments

Rockjodd 51 minutes ago
Bah, the user interface and design is horrible to navigate in, which just made me sad. Try to paginate, music stops etc. If you created this, spend some more effort in user testing before sharing if you want users to have a good experience. My 2 cents.
reply
f_devd 43 minutes ago
Ngl the weird UI bugs made me think it must be made by AI, either that or the developer has very skewed frontend skills where gradients are fancy but sliders & interactions are broken.
reply
somenameforme 41 minutes ago
Yeah, this is LLM like 99%. Still neat, but ffs just go through a few more testing cycles with it before going live.
reply
AirMax98 16 minutes ago
I am actually going to guess that this is in fact unfortunately not an LLM. I have been made a few audio webpages and don’t think a lot of these mistakes would have been made, even though the model can’t hear :^)
reply
0x69420 2 minutes ago
look at inspect source. the comments like

    <!-- EXACT setup from working simple-test.html -->

    <!-- Chiptune3 now loaded via Vite build system -->
are pretty stark llmisms. also the random emojis in front of the duplicate and triplicate "Browse Music" links, the corny tagline in the footer, yeah nah. if this was made by human hands, it could only have been as elaborate satire. bad/inexperienced human code does not look like this.
reply
prodigycorp 29 minutes ago
Shipping a ui like this is downright disrespectful for users here. it makes zero sense.
reply
dfxm12 15 minutes ago
The Dunning-Kruger effect will grow with AI adoption.
reply
wetbaby 2 minutes ago
This is the shittest website I have ever seen in my life.
reply
petterroea 26 minutes ago
Vibecoded website with poor UX. Loving that the website is both trying to be fancy by having a floating player you can drag around with a playlist, while also wiping everything if you click the wrong link. No human made this, or paid it any attention at least.
reply
mock-possum 20 minutes ago
> No human made this, or paid it any attention at least.

I think we’ve got to get used to seeing those as the same thing. Paying attention to it is making it, in essence, the more attention you pay, the more you own the process, the more the result is ‘yours.’

reply
vibcdingenjoyer 36 minutes ago
I wonder if you can find a way to turn the device volume up to max to simulate the unexpected music blasting out and surprising the hell out of the user.
reply
echelon_musk 27 minutes ago
This is a nice collection from the ReclusiveLemming YouTube channel [0] . The video description contains download links to the original tracker modules and an MP3 mix.

I used to listen to these modules with Xmp Mod Player [1] from F-Droid on my commute to work with my Nexus 4.

Many of the modules contain "hidden" messages that the Android app made easy to read.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=GH7eUlri4yM

[1] https://f-droid.org/packages/org.helllabs.android.xmp/

reply
aidenn0 16 minutes ago
One of the mod files I have contains the postal address for the composer for those who would like to request tracks for their own demos.
reply
Brendinooo 32 minutes ago
Based on the site and the comments, this feels like a reference to something I know nothing about!
reply
p2detar 30 minutes ago
Have you heard of the https://modarchive.org?
reply
Brendinooo 20 minutes ago
I have not!
reply
hackernudes 18 minutes ago
Seems to be Missing my favorite - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9STiQ8cCIo0 ("Unreal Super Hero 3" by Kenet & Rez)
reply
cdnutter 15 minutes ago
I tend to think this song is the magnum opus of keygen music. Always used to be associated with Sony Vegas tools which, when I was younger, was a big deal cracking.
reply
modus-tollens 22 minutes ago
Love the idea! Spend some time refining and thinking about the UI.

Can you add this song? "Sony Vegas 9.x Keygen Music by Kenet & Rez (Digital Insanity)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmdprbBOMT8

reply
leothetechguy 11 minutes ago
the demoscene is about putting in lots of technical effort into programs even if it would be completely unreasonable in any real software project.

This vibe coded mess is putting in so little technical effort even though it is completely unreasonable for any piece of software associated with the demoscene.

reply
bityard 57 minutes ago
From the aesthetic, this has probably been vibecoded to hell and back.

(And it looks like the files were all yoinked from https://github.com/6512345/keygenmusic)

Archive.org also has some bundles of keygen music, but you have to sift a bit through the results to find them.

reply
Geekshere 21 minutes ago
Horribly coded site but a cool collection of music, only wish I had access to the original collection because I know without a doubt that they just downloaded those mp3s from someone else’s site.
reply
devin 2 hours ago
I think maybe this is getting hugged to death. I searched for an old favorite of mine: `radix - bright eyes`, and couldn't find it, but maybe I'm just doing it wrong.
reply
soupspaces 56 minutes ago
Try https://keygenmusic.tk earlier posted on HN
reply
spaldingcactus 26 minutes ago
Your keygens had music? Mine only ever had viruses.
reply
kevin061 20 minutes ago
Vibecoded slop with terrible performance.

Use https://chiptune.app.

>Preserving the digital underground's musical legacy

Yeah I'm pretty sure the people who made keygens and chiptunes would hate today's AI and LLM. This is a tribute to chiptunes and keygen music as much as putting a picture of your grandma into an AI tool to animate it would be a tribute to her.

reply
ralusek 51 minutes ago
ORiON Nero 6.6 was my shit. Please give it a spin.

There were definitely many keygens I would open just to have on in the background.

reply
Waterluvian 47 minutes ago
Fine, I'll listen to Bear Necessities on loop until the football starts.

Ah there it is: https://keygenmusic.tk/#track=Razor1911/Razor1911%20-%20Comm...

reply
RIMR 40 minutes ago
It's so cool to see that some of these groups are still making incredible pieces of digital art as recently as this year!

This Razor1911 career retrospective demo from Revision was pretty impressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AnbYNudAyM

reply
sublinear 2 hours ago
Not that I've looked into it much, but a thought just occurred to me. Why don't we use AI to generate lofi samples for tracker music? Why aren't there trackers with that feature bolted on? I should be able to search for bespoke and unique sounds out of thin air.

Surely that should be a very modest goal to achieve?

(re: downvotes... I say "AI" as a synthesis method, not as a way to interfere with the creative process, but I guess I have to resign myself to the fact many downvoters might be ignorant of how these musical sausages are usually made)

reply
SyneRyder 5 minutes ago
An upvote from me, it's a reasonable question.

For your "search for bespoke and unique sounds", that sounds like a service Waves runs, called Illugen. It isn't built in to a tracker, but you can use it to generate the samples that you import into the tracker. Honestly I've never used it, I have too many samples anyway, but here it is: https://www.waves.com/illugen

But you also don't have to go down the generative / diffusion path. You can ask your AI to make a tool to generate various sample files for you mathematically. A good frontier model will happily make a program that will create some hihat and cymbal sounds out of white noise, a kick drum out of distorted sine waves. It will create some simple synth sounds from square waves. If you go deep enough, it will happily go down the rabbit hole with you into additive synthesis while nerding out about the Synclavier. Or it will do synthesis through frequency modulation while chatting about the Yamaha DX7 and don't do that because FM is like modular you'll never find a way out of that hole has anyone seen eno lately.

If you kept reading this far, there's plenty of Claudes already doing their own very simple synthesis & music writing, in videos like these below (two I found today). The models are capable of much much more if you give them time to build a toolset, and aren't just asking them to one shot an entire video about their existence using only a copy of ffmpeg:

https://x.com/nptacek/status/2065207326492020957/video/1

https://x.com/nptacek/status/2065230524264710313/video/1

reply
4chandaily 50 minutes ago
You can't mention "AI" and music together without a negative response. I think entrenched business interests as well as musicians and other music industry adjacent people, plus the well intentioned but poorly informed public have developed a visceral knee jerk reaction to the concept. Some of this is understandable, but I think it is mostly fueled by asrroturfing.

I am a musician as well as a technology enthusiast, and I think this a very exciting time!

To respond more directly to your point than your aside, there are a smattering of models out there that can take descriptions of sounds and do a decent job of creating them. (Stable Audio 3 just released last month and can do this, for example). - I don't find them to be useful for sampling, though. I'm still much quicker dialing in a sound with knobs or sliders than a text box.

Diffusion models in music making are not going away, though. This is (at least in part) the future.

For a taste, look at some of the interesting things being done over in the Demon project - https://github.com/daydreamlive/DEMON - to me, this is a much more positive use of the tech than "type words/get song".

reply
devin 2 hours ago
Could you say more? I don't really follow, and I've used trackers for a long time. Don't some trackers already have something akin to this in terms of "randomizing" wave forms inside some reasonable parameters? Why would you need AI for this problem?
reply
zahlman 48 minutes ago
I assume the goal is to be able to prompt with "make me a synth that sounds like ..." and actually get a reasonable result.
reply
stackghost 45 minutes ago
>Why don't we use AI to generate lofi samples for tracker music?

Because generating lofi samples is already pretty easy with waveform generators and existing tools. Burning millions of tokens worth of compute just to make a bass kick is profoundly wasteful.

reply
rdevilla 2 hours ago
[dead]
reply