Blog
Reverse-engineering, protocol archaeology, and working with AI coding agents on long-horizon firmware and editor projects.
DAWless-style workflow without giving up the power of the DAW. The Roland MC-500mkII (1988) — the kind of beautiful, tactile box you can run without looking — drives your DAW's transport, jog wheel, and 99 location memories. A small bridge does the connecting.
Telling an AI agent what to do is easy. Getting it to reliably follow process requires something structural — skills, session journals, and correction-driven guardrails.
Claude Code and Codex independently implemented the same draggable zone feature for the Akai S3000XL editor. The code was comparable. The sessions were not.
We asked two AI coding agents to implement the same draggable zone editing feature for the Akai S3000XL editor. The most useful comparison wasn't about code quality -- it was about failure modes.
How a failed attempt to run Akai's MESA II in a Mac OS 9 emulator led us through 38 disproven theories in five days of intense debugging, and ultimately to a standalone 68k emulator that cracked the protocol in four hours.
An open-source Raspberry Pi bridge that lets you send SCSI commands to vintage samplers and computers over HTTP and WebSocket -- no SCSI card required.
Real-time hardware sync, integrated video capture, debug tools, and quality-of-life improvements for the free S-330 sampler editor.
A comprehensive guide to Roland's S-series sampler family — from the affordable S-330 to the flagship S-770, including the W-30 workstation, original accessories, and modern editing tools.
A guide to the Roland S-330 sampler and the open-source web editor for modern workflows.