Projects
I've always been into programming of sorts. From my Commodore 64 BASIC days. I never made anything significant, but I think my first utilities were DOS batch files. Fast forward to 2010 or so and my first Mac, then to Keyboard Maestro, and me hacking together automations. I even had a small business made around one. Now Claude lets me build small tools just for me. Most are plugins for Obsidian which I use for learning and playing traditional Irish music.
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Tune Finder
An Obsidian plugin that identifies traditional tunes in your own recordings. It listens, transcribes the melody and searches the tune collection on thesession.org for the closest match, along the lines of FolkFriend or Tunepal. It works best one tune at a time, so it pairs well with the two tools below.
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trad-split
Takes a recording of a whole session, such as a phone voice memo, and splits it into the sets of tunes and the chat in between. It writes out each set as its own audio file, along with a Reaper project for checking the cuts and an Obsidian note ready for tune names. It uses a neural network trained to tell music from speech.
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Audio Loop Player
An Obsidian plugin for practising along with recordings. It has named A to B loop sections, an optional pause between repeats, and a speed slider. Sections are saved for each file, so they’re still there next time.
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ABC Sol-fa
An Obsidian plugin that shows tunes written in ABC notation with sol-fa syllables under the notes and Kodály stick notation above them, for teaching tunes by ear.
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Chromatic Tuner
A tuner inside Obsidian for guitar, bass, tenor banjo, mandolin, violin or cello, plus a chromatic mode for anything else. You pick the microphone, and the audio never leaves your device.
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PGN Speak
Reads a chess game aloud, move by move, for practising blindfold chess. Paste in a game or a Lichess link and listen. It started as a Keyboard Maestro macro and is now a web page that runs entirely in the browser, with an Obsidian version too.
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Poker Odds Trainer
A web app for drilling the maths of Texas Hold’em: outs, equity, pot odds. Every number on screen is worked out live, and each one can show its working.