Keygen.music
89 points
2 hours ago
| 24 comments
| keygen.music
| HN
Rockjodd
1 hour ago
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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.
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f_devd
1 hour ago
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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.
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somenameforme
1 hour ago
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Yeah, this is LLM like 99%. Still neat, but ffs just go through a few more testing cycles with it before going live.
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AirMax98
50 minutes ago
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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 :^)
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0x69420
37 minutes ago
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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.
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mrandish
2 minutes ago
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> <!-- EXACT setup from working simple-test.html -->

All LLM-kind would be vastly improved if the words "exact" and "brilliant" were nerfed to hell in their pre-training weights or even just removed from their training distributions entirely. Virtually nothing outside of mathematics is "exact", and virtually nothing outside of colors should be described as "brilliant".

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chorkpop
3 minutes ago
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Also why is there no big "Play" button? I have to click a bunch to even hear an example.
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larodi
12 minutes ago
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it screems vibecoding without the slightest idea what they doing.
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kromokromo
28 minutes ago
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Also a missed opportunity for some of that sweet vanilla html paired with the keygen and crack ansi splash screens
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prodigycorp
1 hour ago
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Shipping a ui like this is downright disrespectful for users here. it makes zero sense.
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dfxm12
50 minutes ago
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The Dunning-Kruger effect will grow with AI adoption.
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petterroea
1 hour ago
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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.
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nialv7
3 minutes ago
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> a floating player you can drag

you can drag only by clicking on a ui element that has no indication that it can be dragged.

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mock-possum
55 minutes ago
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> 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.’

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wren6991
16 minutes ago
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A steaming pile of webslop. Thanks Claude.

Music is cool though

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slicktux
8 minutes ago
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Unable to browse because I’m on mobile but Satellite One by Purple Motion is a track to listen to! <3
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vibcdingenjoyer
1 hour ago
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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.
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Brendinooo
1 hour ago
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Based on the site and the comments, this feels like a reference to something I know nothing about!
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p2detar
1 hour ago
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Have you heard of the https://modarchive.org?
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Brendinooo
55 minutes ago
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I have not!
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smusamashah
13 minutes ago
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This website is horrific on phone. A sane human made website with keygen music has been shared on HN a few times already.
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echelon_musk
1 hour ago
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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/

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aidenn0
51 minutes ago
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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.
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bityard
1 hour ago
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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.

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modus-tollens
57 minutes ago
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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

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hackernudes
53 minutes ago
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Seems to be Missing my favorite - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9STiQ8cCIo0 ("Unreal Super Hero 3" by Kenet & Rez)
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cdnutter
50 minutes ago
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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.
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Geekshere
56 minutes ago
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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.
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kevin061
55 minutes ago
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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.

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petercooper
8 minutes ago
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I was coming here to recommend https://chiptune.app/ too - it's great, and super fast to boot.
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leothetechguy
46 minutes ago
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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.

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devin
1 hour ago
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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.
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soupspaces
1 hour ago
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Try https://keygenmusic.tk earlier posted on HN
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system2
16 minutes ago
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LLM is plaguing the internet as usual. This site is proof of what a non-technical, inexperienced person comes up with with vibe coding.

With Claude Code in less than 5 minutes, I can come up with something 10x better, at least usable, with basic UX knowledge and flow basics.

Sorry if I offended the author, but he/she can learn from these comments.

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meindnoch
35 minutes ago
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Jester - Stardust Memories
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spaldingcactus
1 hour ago
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Your keygens had music? Mine only ever had viruses.
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wetbaby
37 minutes ago
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This is the shittest website I have ever seen in my life.
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ralusek
1 hour ago
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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.

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Waterluvian
1 hour ago
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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...

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RIMR
1 hour ago
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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

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ChrisArchitect
25 minutes ago
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<starts browsing the groups section...> "Founded: 2002.... Founded: 2007..."

huh? Preserving groups that 'shaped the scene' would make me think late 80s and early 90s! c'mon now

https://www.scene.org/ is the way to go, no?

..Suppose that's not going to include hacking groups, but still.

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sublinear
1 hour ago
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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)

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petercooper
6 minutes ago
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Not quite what you suggested, but I did some experiments several months ago "enhancing" the samples in tracker music with some models, and they sounded terrible. There really is something about the sound of tracker files that's just right. But sure, you could generate lo-fi samples, there's a lot of computer generated samples in music, but putting them together into a pleasing combination is the hard bit.
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4chandaily
1 hour ago
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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".

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SyneRyder
40 minutes ago
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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

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devin
1 hour ago
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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?
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zahlman
1 hour ago
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I assume the goal is to be able to prompt with "make me a synth that sounds like ..." and actually get a reasonable result.
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stackghost
1 hour ago
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>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.

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