Four hours with a borrowed tape machine.

Nine days before any of this had a name, at five in the morning, Elijah typed a sentence about selling.

I am starting to realize that any commercial effort needs two parts. A producer, and a seller. I am a heavy producer, but I am weak in selling.

Elijah · Feb 13, 5:00 am

He has made sound for more than twenty years: beats, voices for games, a stream. A tool of his own on a shelf would be a first. That week a friend lent him a Teenage Engineering OP-1 Field, and the part he couldn't put down was its tape.

The OP-1F tape is powerful because of what it removes.

Elijah · Feb 16

Four tracks and no undo. You record over what's there or you live with it. Then the OP-1 had to go home.

No undo anxiety — the constraint IS the instrument.

Elijah · Feb 20

Sunday.

Two days later he opened REAPER and asked for the tape back.

I want to re-create the scratchpad capabilities in REAPER, and then as a parallel effort, create a native macOS app that works as a layering audio scratchpad like the OP-1F tape recorder.

Elijah · Feb 22

The commit log from that afternoon tells it.

The first decision is the one everything since has inherited. What you play goes straight into the buffer. Slow the tape down and the slowed tape is the tape.

The buffers will be immediately written to the in-memory file, so if the user slows down or changes play rate, direction, the changes will be reflected immediately.

Elijah · Feb 22, 4:25 pm

By 6:07 it had In, Out and Loop. By 7:13 there was a four-track sibling, X4. An iPhone project was scaffolded before midnight. The rename commit already admits to a hacky, broken web version: every platform was in the plan from hour four, and one of them was already broken. That was fine.

The plugins from that Sunday are still free for REAPER. The tape plays in your browser too.