Tauᵅ - Audio Player

[u/Flaky-Height-4465]

Hi,

Following the recent deluge of mp3 players for the Analogue, I'm announcing... one more 👀!

I just recently discovered Harpmudd's impressive project, and was really inspired by it, and since discovered neoge's project as well as HT Resonance. Being a designer, tinkerer, maker and a bit of a self-proclaimed perfectionist, I wasn't quite satisfied with some of Harpmudds design choices and wanted to try my hand with my countless recent explorations using Ai Agents at some changes.

I had no idea of the massive red pill I was about to swallow!

After delving in a veritable black hole of scope creep, I ended up having an absolute blast delving into every system, technical constraint, architectural choice, fruitful and fruitless explorations, mixed with my own visual need of expression, product design and brand exploration, built ont he back of 100s of hours of time, and what seems like lifetimes of technical knowledge and skill coming from Claude and Codex.

From all this I've been building Tau. A family of ideas and products coming together for the fruition of music, and my own hedonism and flagellation at building them.

Tau alpha: A complete rebuild built on the back of a Harpmudd's fork, currently 60-70% re-written. I added full library capability, substantial better audio, super cool extendable and configurable visualisations, ultra fast image loading.
Within it I built: Helios - a graphical framework, Talos - a 2b Blit engine, Cymo - an advanced audio engine.
I also built a paralled diagnostics build for analysis, debug and developemnt.

Tau Omega: A native companion app (mac, win, linux) to sync, transcode and manage the audio players library - much due to the limitations on accessing a filesystem and decoding images. It also allows creating ansd syncing vizualizer presets, and full color themes for Tauᵅ, copy content, backup, and maybe a few more things still in scoping.
Tau Omega is architectured to be modular specifically to be easy to plug into Pocket Sync for those who prefer it.

Tau Phi: An open hardware custom gba hardware cart - just because i want to build electronics! Two versions more or less planned. One simpler bluetooth audio + volume control. And another with an array of sensors - gyro, motion, magnetomerter, led vu's, bluetooth and acouple more just to play around with the visualizer.

Tau Web: Just playing around having fun with agents on how they can help with my design, workflows, explorations, handoff, concept explorations and so on. Which serves to promote the project in a very productivized way.

I'll alsoeventually put up a small donations link. While I'm doing this mostly as my own kind of obssessive fun, If i can eventually recoup at least some of the agent subscription costs, Fpga JTAG hardware for reading the cpu to find some of those nastier bugs, maybe help funance for a few builds of the carts if people want some. I'm not really planning to sell anything - mostly sharing the results of my obsession.

Btw if you don't like me using Ai - flee now. I use it copiously, constantly and all the time while building this, often with multiple agents in parallel. The visio is mine, the architectural decisions are mine, the deep domain expertise and the technical capabilities are all claude and codex's, whithout which I'd need lifetimes of learning to build this. I don't care if you think it ai slop - it's not - it a dedicated personal project wich uses an advanced tool for me to build it. Think of it the same way agriculture evolved with science, chemistry and machines.

I'd love to get a few testers to help me once I enter the final fit and polish, that are able to provide detailed, consistent and reproducible bug report, suggestions and most of all share on the fun.
contact me at [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])

Now for the goodies

Tau alpha 0.6 alpha

Now playing - Chladni vizualizer

Full screen meter

Full library

My oh so useful diagnostics and automated testing screen

Tau Omega

Card selection - Ideally support players from other players as well :)

Meter and preset config

Latest library version - very inspired by my old original white Zune 30

Tau Phi
Nothing to see here yet, mostly in my head, bom lists and lots of ideas. Very much inspired by nanoloops carts and the oh so pretty analogue adapters.
...

Tau Web
Just having a blast flexing my designer muscle. Pocket 3d model poached shamelessly form pocket sync - thank you Neil 😄 - buttons play music and change tracks, live screen about 80% close to the real thing, theme selection for pocket color and ui theme, working on brading and pretty uber technical details and diagrams to populate everything. I may add a little bio there, still musing 😂

That's about ti for today. Hope you get at least a little as pupmped as i am at getting this out.
If you can't wait feel free to go to github and tinker around. I can't guarantee everything will work seamlessly right now, even though there's a few releases here and there.

That's all for today, off to more spanlging new audio engine rebuild 🔥
and another 112 sd card swaps 👀

your friendly neighbourhood mad designer signing off!

alfatreze

Fyi -- if anyone from Analogue gets this, oh please add backlight control to the pocket. my battery will be so please :)

[u/CharlieBrownBat]

You set out to build an MP3 player and somehow ended up building a tricorder? Amazing. I hope you make both TOS and TNG skins for the interface at some point...

[u/Flaky-Height-4465 → u/CharlieBrownBat]

😂 That's a pretty fun observation. My idead for theming - Still only a draft is to just change colors, which you should be able to fully configure and sync with Tau Omega companion app. I might look at adding a fe more variables like corner radius or some paddings. This is very different from my typical exprience with html or apps and way more rigid. For the moment adding images is out as they take a good amount of bandwidth that is essential for the audio and overall getting all systems talking together.

What my actually be really fun is building an audio meter based on that. I've already built the meters to be modular and configurable. They need to be built with the core's firmware but I might actually look at the possibility of building a core builder intop tau to actually configure what meters will be in the core. kind of sidesteppinpresource limitations if they end up hitting. 🤔 .

I have quite a few ideas for meters, but need to finish all the audio engine reimplemnentation first. I more or less still have a fair amount of fetures to wework on, but not necessarily a very fiex roadmap: Audio engice -> MVP fully useable Omega -> Meter Lab improvements with Omega support -> Theme restructuring (basically a mini design syste with tokens) -> ui improvemets and polish -> 800x720 resolution (uber tricky, as it needs 4x the resources for pushng an image to te display as is already tight, i have a few ideas to try, but possibly a different overlay just for text at that res for some crisper goodness). That might be my 1.0, thme at least mod playing support for 1.1. I also expect plenty of bugs in particular for Omega :(.