WAVELOOP TIMELINE

The seed idea — psychoacoustic presets that change how sound sits in space

"I want to somehow set up different sonic shapes... maybe I'm just defining a reverb preset, but I want dimensional fading — as the volume changes, so does its interaction with the space of the music, following psychoacoustic principles."

The honest reckoning — heavy producer, weak seller

"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. I need to figure out how to automate the process of selling, communicating value..."

Elijah borrows Charles' OP-1 Field

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

Has to give back the OP-1, gets FOMO

"No undo anxiety — the constraint IS the instrument."

The four-hour sprint that started everything

"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."

Destructive buffer, no undo — the core design decision

"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."

Ratio speeds 0.5x / 1x / 2x

"Yeah I think we should use ratio speeds? Or at least quantize the slider so it only allows for stepped speeds."

In / Out / Loop model

"I would like to add three buttons to the UI. In, Out, Loop. These set the loop points. By default, in is 0. When out is set, loop mode is active."

Decision to go native — CoreAudio, Swift, 3:38 AM

"I want WaveLoop to be re-created natively for my macOS. It should use the CoreAudio system inputs and outputs. I want it to be performant."

One-shot triggering logic splits into its own app

"Let's remove the 'play avoiding logic', I will be making a totally separate app for this... We will delegate this 'one shot' to the next window called 'Choppa'."

Choppa's signature constraint — one voice at a time

"Add a 'choke' mode to Choppa that constrains it to one sound at a time, and make that default."

How the product ecosystem fits together

"The macOS app should just be called 'WaveLoop', it's like the end of the funnel so to speak. The JSFX REAPER plugins are outreach tools to get people into my creative suite architecture."

Eat: combine mirror windows

"now we need an 'eat' button which combines the current and next mirrors into one, but then the user can record over that, and eat another one if they choose. a way of managing the window"

waveloop.config source of truth — one file drives all platforms

"Base file 'waveloop.config' — this is our source of truth for these apps. It is to be our guide when implementing the suite."

The tagline that defined the product

"I want the tagline of this software to be 'Get off the grid' — The goal of this general effort is to remove the constraints of being 'perfect' and just getting ideas out. WaveLoop is the first shippable artifact of this vision and direction."

The purpose of WaveLoop, in Elijah's words

"The purpose of this is to create an immediate and permanent scratchpad. Forcing the creator to consider the signal going in before they record. Training the ear."

Choppa MIDI focus + pad/knob layout

"Let's figure out a way to shift the MIDI controller focus from WaveLoop to Choppa, which will re-color all the things to represent the Choppa concerns."

Domain purchased, marketing site started, Lucian Labs formed

"Create a business for Lucian Labs, under which I will be publishing all my plugins, apps, etc. Basically everything revenue generating will be done under Lucian Labs."

The design philosophy crystallizes

"This is a platform of experimentation, not fidelity. The only accuracy we are concerned about is accurate timing of recorded events."

Deliberate degradation — cheap algorithms to deteriorate each recording pass

"I want to add a 'tape mode' which uses various cheap algorithms to deteriorate / attenuate / distort / delay / warp / mangle / etc each recording pass slightly. I understand this is all cheap, and it's intentional."

Waveforms draw in 4-pixel blocks — the lofi visual identity

"Make it so that the waveforms draw a little bit more pixely vibe. So like in 4 pixel blocks. If that makes sense."

Realizing the journey itself is worth documenting

"I feel like the earlier sessions are worth capturing, as they were the birthplace of the WaveLoop product. I have always struggled with going back in my mind to describe the problem I was trying to solve... now with the agentic AI, my thought process is almost directly translated here."

iOS Choppa reads WaveGlyph from JSFX — cross-platform audio bridge working

"Tie WaveGlyph into iOS Choppa please. Have a 'wav' and 'png'. This is going goood."

The pivot that changed everything

"What if it ran on a Pi?"

"OMG THIS DELAY IS SO FUCKING COOL" — the moment

"OMG THIS DELAY IS SO FUCKING COOL. I'm gonna play with this and brainstorm some more ideas... this is the coolest shit ever... good night. Make best guesses, worst case, we roll back in source control <3"

Bare metal dev means no graceful exits

"I always forget I can load another terminal... I tried killing it: ^C^C^C^C^C"

The UX philosophy — make overdub feel inviting, not scary

"You should be able to hear the recorded audio while you overdub. The goal is to enable creation, and encourage the desire to add to the tape."

Chew: half-focus the mirror window, pick the half you're in

"ok when I use 'chew', it doesn't show the section repeated, it still only shows the original, i hear the repeated sections, but it shows the full loop."

Flat: bake mirrored view into buffer, then drop ref

"no keep the pane expanded, it's part of the workflow i want, because I want to be able to flatten back out with the same loop window if that makes sense."

Unified audio engine across WaveLoop, Choppa, and Tide

"Honestly let's just cut it over to Swift. I want to use some unified audio engine stuff between WaveLoop, Choppa, Tide, and anything to do with audio."

3 rounds of debugging left-channel-only audio. Rewrote ASIO selectors. Traced the entire signal path.

"My headphones were unscrewed. lmao"

The moment the project outgrew one machine

"My brain is starting to feel the drain. I'm moving over to my Windows PC to finish the Windows port of WaveLoop. Gonna get it to pull context and continue."

4 screensavers ported from waveOS: sine drift, starfield, breathing pulse, dual wave interference. 5-min idle, auto-cycle, wake on input

"Screensavers? If it hasn't been touched for 5 mins, throw on a screensaver... even if audio is playing, but not during record. So like they can leave the looper on in the bg."

SD card borked, can't SSH — the recovery arc begins

"ok we gotta make the waveloop rasberry pi card happy again"

Ubuntu laptop declared as the waveOS development machine

"this laptop is going to be the one we are going to dev the waveos stuff with."

Switches to 128GB card for dev — overkill but pragmatic

"I have a 128gb card, but that seems ridonk overkill. lets use it to test"

Gives up on old image, installs fresh Pi OS, near-zero rebuild

"didn't work. so i got a fresh pi os installed... we are starting from near zero."

No source code on device, only compiled binaries — production rule

"when we build and deploy images, i don't want the code on the device, just the binary."

Everything works on fresh Pi OS — suspects old imaging process was broken

"works perf. set it to autolaunch, save this state. my instinct is something went wrong during the image making process"

waveOS should accept any display and auto-detect resolution/rotation

"it should accept any kind of display, and use that display in it's full capacity"

Published waveOS image contained WiFi credentials

"lolll. umm disable the pi download on the site for now, it has my ssid and password lmao"

In-app WiFi selector — pick network, enter password, no SSH needed

"since this is meant to be a product, I wanted to give the user the ability to select their wifi in app."

WiFi selection working in-app with connection confirmation

"need some kind of connection confirmation, maybe the settings wifi row should show the ssid and a check or something. but yeah its great"

Tilde (~) key chosen for config — it looks like a wave

"tilde works, it's like a wave, on brand"

Wave animation during startup, replacing Linux boot text

"get this ready to ship to the world. One thing I want to do is get some kind of wave animation going during startup."

waveOS needs an OS-level experience, not just an app

"it's WAVEOS, so it needs to have an OS experience ya feel me"

Splash fades out, waveloop takes over via SIGUSR1 signal

"that sso sick. there were a couple lines of text on the screen during the intro... but that's fine for the first version."

Dedicated folder for splash programs — agents can contribute animations

"i want the agents to put this splash program somewhere that it will be picked up when we rebuild, basically we are gonna dream up a ton of them"

Scope creep: screensavers on idle, 5 min timer, cycle every 5 min

"ok.. so just because i love scope creep. screensavers? if hasn't been touched for 5 mins, throw on a screen saver, cycles every 5 minutes"

Screensavers working on the Pi — immediate social media post

"fucking sexy my dude. ok do me a favour and reboot this. I am gonna do a social media post."

User-installable .so screensaver plugins, future download marketplace

"is it possible for users to add their own screensavers? i would like to eventually have a place for people to download them on the site lol"

Spare card boots to app, crashes on record, reboots itself back — systemd restart works

"ohhh shit. it booted up to the app, everything worked, but then i started recording it and crashed."

Ubuntu/Debian desktop version forked from waveOS codebase

"how far are we from an ubuntu / debian version of waveloop? if not far, make it happen"

Landing pages were showing build-from-source for a private repo

"omg the pages should never show build from source instructions. my repo is private"

waveOS and Linux builds are free but not open source

"ok so with waveos and linux it's not open source yet. just free"

Five parallel tasks during imaging — the chaos is the process

"omg im lost. doign 5 thigns"