A Complete Studio in a Python Script

A code studio earns its keep the moment you can change one decision without paying for all the others. Move a melody and yes, something has to play it again. Turn down the room return and nothing should have to play anything — that’s a mix, and a mix ought to cost seconds.

The repository makes that split visible in its output folders. A score holds the notes. Dry buses hold the performance. Processed stems hold what each part actually contributes to the mix. Delivery exports hold the files people listen to. Every change belongs to exactly one of those stages, and knowing which one is most of the skill.

Begin with a complete small piece

From the repository:

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
python scripts/generate_portable_samples.py --piece afterimage --output-dir Tracks/demo

Afterimage is built from synthesized tones and noise, so there’s nothing to download and no plugin to configure. Open Window and Night Transit are different arrangements through the same small renderer. FFmpeg, if you have it, adds the WAV and MP3 delivery exports.

Look under Tracks/demo/afterimage and you’ll find score.json, a dry/ directory, a stems/ directory, mix-float.wav and a manifest. Open the script next to those folders. Each directory is a stage you can open up and inspect, which is a thing a DAW project file will never let you do.

Write the form before the sound

A track specification holds tempo, harmony, motifs and section choices. A composition function walks that specification and puts notes on instrument buses. The portable example keeps this deliberately tiny; the album modules carry each track’s own form and production settings.

A word of warning, learned the hard way: a different random seed is not a different composition. It’s the same song wearing a slightly different hat. Give each track an actual reason to exist — a shorter phrase, a different register, a lead that holds back for eight bars, a middle section that contradicts the rest, an ending that finally resolves what the sequence has been circling.

Then the performance stage decides timing, articulation and velocity. Keep related notes related. A chord can roll in one direction; a phrase can lean into its ending. Independent jitter sprinkled on every note boundary usually sounds less intentional than the rigid grid it replaced.

Keep the drums outside the pitch warp

In Sign-Off the pitched material goes through slowdown and tape movement while the drum attacks stay on the final tempo grid. That one routing decision lets the music drift and sag without making the beat hard to follow. How much damage a track takes is the track’s own business — some want an unstable broadcast, others want something gentler to lie underneath.

The Quiet Hours works from a different palette entirely: Salamander Grand Piano with VSCO Community Edition strings. Its source preparation script keeps the license records and pins the source revisions it downloaded. Those samples are obtained separately; they aren’t copied into the public repository.

Reuse the correct stage

Once the sources are rendered, edit the portable sketch’s mix settings and run:

python scripts/generate_portable_samples.py --piece afterimage --output-dir Tracks/demo --remix

That reuses the dry WAVs. It will not apply changes to notes, tempo, timbre or performance rules — those need a fresh source render, and quietly pretending otherwise is how you end up shipping last week’s melody.

The album renderer has --resume as well, which compares its code and score fingerprint, the master hash and the recorded asset hashes before it skips a track. That’s track-level caching, not a general dependency graph; it can only notice what it was told to fingerprint. Keep the source assets and the render environment with the project.

Export what the mix actually contains

A shared room return is its own stem. A nonlinear group effect produces a group stem. Sum the processed float stems, compare that sum against the float mix before any dither or MP3 encoding, and then measure the delivery files themselves rather than assuming they inherited the mix’s good behaviour. The stem article goes through the checks properly.

And then listen. The album players present the result as a sequence rather than a folder of files, which is the only way to hear whether the transitions work. Saved stages make it cheap to try a change. They have no opinion whatsoever about whether it was an improvement.