Instaudio

A friend of mine wanted a site that let him [very] easily share music he’s working on. Most sites require a lot of information and/or have terrible interfaces, so I built something that’s very easy to use and super-quick. On Instaud.io you just drag or select an audio file, and you’re presented with a player and shareable URL, without further ado. The player prefers HTML5 audio (which makes it usable on most mobile devices), and has a flash fall-back.

As of May 2013, I’m still actively working on new features and improvements.

Dropbox-based photo sharing tool

In order to easily share a set of photos with some of my family (who aren’t members of social media websites), I created a little tool to quickly generate an album of photos. I just a folder of photos in a designated dropbox folder, and it automatically syncs up with my VPS, and makes them available at photos.michd.me/<folder name>. Optionally, I can add a set.json file in the directory which can provide captions to go with the photos, as well as dictate order of the photos. This is something I only have for my private use, but I thought it was worth listing here regardless. It works through some nginx configuration and a little bit of PHP to scan the folder or parse the set.json file.

Step sequencer in JavaScript

As an experiment, I created something to sequence playback of drum samples using HTML5′s <audio> and JavaScript. At the time of writing it only performs reasonably well in Google Chrome. Lets you add/remove channels, pick samples, change tempo, change time signature and change channel volume or mute. When I get around to it, I’m planning to add a server-side component to allow saving and sharing patterns composed. View the repository on Github.

Task Timer

To help keep track of my working hours on a task basis, I built a simple task timer in JavaScript. It is very minimal in features but gets the job done. View the repository on Github.

Brainfuck interpreter in JavaScript

The esoteric programming language “brainfuck” had been intriguing me for a while because of it minimalism. I decided to build an interpreter for it in the language of the web, and it later grew into a bit of a debugger, with slow stepping and a memory view. View the repository on Github.

URL exposer

Annoyed by shady links by potential spam bots, I decided to write a quick tool to see where the redirects would eventually take me. I also built a neat (or so I like to think) template for little tools like these. View the repository on Github.

Cimylium – Limitless (Ambient album)

After countless failed trance projects, I decided to give ambient a try, and found that I managed to actually finish songs in this genre. I decided to compose a full album in the style, and this was the result. Production of the 10 tracks was spread out over about a year. It runs for about 42 minutes, and one of the tracks is a collaboration with the prolific SineRider.

Minecraft design tool

Like millions of other people, I got into the Mojang game “Minecraft”. I usually had fun just building big structures, but after a while I thought it’d be useful if I could jot down some 2D plans to refer to. For that purpose I built a little tool in JavaScript that let me use some basic Minecraft textures to sketch designs. The tool lets you set a size for the grid and choose from a number of patterns found in-game. It lets you either export the design to JSON or save it online, giving you a url to share with friends. It remains the single most visited thing on this website.

The Audio Portal

The Audio Portal (or “TAP”) was my biggest personal project. The goal was to create a portal where amateur musicians could post their music, and most importantly, be helped by other artists and vice versa, through reviews. It comes with a portal that takes mp3 files, cover art, a forum, user pages, favoriting, some social sharing, detailed searching and sorting of content, detailed moderation tools, and so forth.

It never really took off for various reasons, but it has been a great learning project. I built everything from the ground up in PHP, without as much as using a backend framework.

BertBranders.be

This was a project for the man that worked on my mother’s kitchen and bathroom renovation. The site is in Dutch, which is my native language. The site’s purpose is to list a bunch of information on the type of work he does, along with contact information, organized in an effective interface.

FPGA MIDI Synthesizer

During our electronics course, my classmate and I teamed up for our yearproject and built a synthesizer, based around an FPGA. It has a standard MIDI input so you can hook up a regular MIDI keyboard. After the year was over, I improved the thing by finally figuring out an old sync issue and then implementing polyphony. The synthesis work on a simple wavetable principle. You can hear it playing “popcorn” on Youtube, or read more about the initial project and the later improvements.

Moto.R.Varen

This is a website for a motor-biking club that organises yearly 10-day trips through the mountains in Europe. I built a sort of custom CMS for it to manage the trip data. Graphics design was done by the trip organiser.