r/linuxaudio • u/cptblackbeard1 • 1d ago

TR-8S Studio: open source (MIT) web studio for the Roland TR-8S on Linux. Reverse engineered SysEx over ALSA raw MIDI, live follow, and a chat assistant. Built largely with Claude Code, declared up front

Self-promotion, and AI disclosure first because rule 4: most of the code was written with Claude Code over a handful of sessions, with me at the machine testing every claim against the real hardware. It is FOSS, MIT, source and everything free, nothing to buy or sign up for. If that disqualifies it here, fair enough, remove it.

What it is: a web studio for the Roland TR-8S drum machine on Linux. Plain Python over ALSA raw MIDI (/dev/snd/midiC*D*), no daemon, no JACK dependency, no build step for the UI. The TR-8S SysEx was undocumented, so it's reverse engineered and written down in the repo with every claim marked verified or not, against firmware 2.51.

It mirrors the machine live: pattern follow through Program Change, variation recognised from the notes it plays, steps lit as they sound, knob moves synced through CC. Edit a step in the browser and the machine has it before the bar ends. Melodies are written through Coarse Tune motion with note names. Every melodic tone was measured for its real root pitch, decay and brightness, so sounds are picked from data.

The chat runs on the Claude Agent SDK with the studio's tools served in-process as an MCP server, on your own Claude subscription or an API key. It builds or changes a groove when you ask in plain words. The screenshot is the grid view while a track it made is playing.

The bit I care about is turning it into a tutor for learning a drum machine, and that part is unbuilt. 465 tests run without the hardware. Three kids and one wife between me and a second job, so it's up for grabs.

https://github.com/ideaCompany/tr8s-studio

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u/cptblackbeard1 1d ago

Short video of the "make me a house track" moment, phone footage but the machine is audible: https://youtu.be/9lKcmGzcwPQ

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u/Salads_and_Sun 1d ago

Well I don't know anything about this drum machine but I'll say I've been learning a lot about what you can do with ALSA MIDI and Python lately and I'm stoked.