Show HN: Strudel Flow, a pattern sequencer built with Strudel and React Flow
github.comThe UI is very nicely built, but I found the actual music making experience very unintuitive. I really didn't know how to build my own thing from scratch. I loaded the Funky Beat preset (indeed very funky once I got it playing!) and noticed a few things
1. I found the play/pause indicator to be confusing. When I loaded it, the play buttons were all highlighted which I interpreted as an "activated" state. Instead they were all paused. I get now that it's a toggle, but my intuition wanted a dedicated "play" button and a dedicated "stop" or "pause" button, with visual indicators to indicate the current "playing" state of the node.
2. One kind of jarring experience I had was it seemed that the loop restarted any time I changed an instrument. In the Funky Beat present, I was changing the "popkick" sample on the Beats node and it made it seem like the beat was continuously breaking and then re-syncing. It would be much nicer if the playback timeline was immutable and the patch changed on the next available iteration.
I think having a few extra items in the default state would be useful to hint to users how to use the software. Even loading Funky Beat by default would be a benefit so it's more clear how multiple nodes can interact. The UI is very clean and well constructed, I feel like there's promise here.
Hey ericyd, thanks for your great feedback and checking out the app. Strudel Flow dev here, I agree with all of these items, especially the second item which is a big priority fix for v2.
For context:
tidalcycles is a music programming language strudel is an implementation for the web
For example, here's a Stranger Things inspired song in strudel:
https://strudel.cc/?jq8RmPcjADF9#c2V0Y3BzKDAuNyk7CgpwMTogbig...
Very nice demo of React Flow and I like the neo brutalism theme in the settings.
Not sure if it is intended or not: on Android Chrome your "Pad" and "Beats" have no indicators of the current location in a sequence.
Also, I think "Samples" or "Sounds" might be more appropriate than "Synths."
Are you planning to continue developing this project further?
Super minor nit: Put "Live demo: <link>" at the top of the readme.
Github's project url thingy is hard to notice tucked into a sidebar.
Thanks! I was thinking it would be nice if someone wrote a post on making different rhythms in tidal cycles
baa2 is the goat
this is cool