rrrad.io

Generative-music NFTs in the era when generative-music NFTs felt like a genuinely good idea. The third project. The one we never put on chain.

The mechanism

A small library of hand-recorded audio stems — drums, bass, lead, pads, fx — keyed by tempo and musical key. The engine (jam_scratch.py) picks compatible stems at random, time-stretches where it has to, layers them into a single mp3, and assigns it metadata: tempo, key, instrument set, vibe descriptor. Each generation is meant to be unique. The total stem library is ~1.6 GB.

Why we didn't ship

Three reasons, in order: the audio compositing was too slow to deploy on App Engine standard (no ffmpeg in the runtime); the bear market arrived and the audience for "you mint a randomly composed track" went to zero; and we couldn't agree on whether each generation should be one-of-one or owner-replayable. We never got to the contract. The code, the stems, and the vibe survived in a Linode that we shut down in 2024 — backed up locally just in time.

What it is here

A Cloud Run service with the stems mounted from GCS, and three modes on the rrrad page that call it: a one-off "surprise me" roll, a "build your own" 9-slot picker, and a continuous radio mode that pre-fetches the next track while the current one plays. No mint, no contract — just live generation. If we ever like what comes back enough to put it on chain, that conversation re-opens.