Lloyd Stellar's Homepage: Free Music Tools, Retro Games, a Wunderkammer and Electro Music

A kick of 291 ms, cut from a take of 17 sounds, trimmed and saved as number 011 of the pack

I made it for myself, because making sample packs was always a chore: record, export, trim, name, number, move the file to the right folder, keep a list of what was done. Now the device does that while I play. It is built around my own way of working, so you have to like my way. If you do, it is yours for free, with a six-page manual.

Six sound types (Drums, Synth, FX, Vocal, Drum loop, Synth loop), note detection for synth one shots, loops in whole bars at Live's tempo with the BPM in the file name, and a memory that survives switching Live Sets, so one pack can come from many tracks. You need Live 12 Suite, or Live 12 Standard with Max for Live, on Windows or Mac.

Start here: Lloyd's Sample Maker, or read the manual first.

Whistlers at 4.5 kilocycles: lightning heard through the Earth's magnetic field, with Gilbert's Orbis Virtutis of 1600 in the dark

There are twenty-eight stations on the dial, each at the frequency where its story happened and each with its source: Friedrich Jürgenson at 1485 kilocycles, the Lincolnshire Poacher, Sputnik, Jupiter, the first pulsar, the hydrogen line. Some keep hours. The dawn chorus only sings in the early morning, the Sun only by day, and Jupiter only when its moon Io is in the right place, all worked out from your own clock. The Wow! signal comes once, and never again.

Below the last turn of the dial there is no radio at all, only five wax cylinders from 1888 to 1890, among them Florence Nightingale asking to be remembered by her voice. My own station is on the dial too, at 826 kilocycles: Hilversum. Whatever you hear can be saved as a 24-bit WAV to use in your own tracks.

Start here: The Alicorn Wireless. It lives under the menu Curiosa, Lloyd's Wunderkammer.

The vault at night: Friar Bacon asleep by the candle, and the head beginning to wake

The vault is drawn by your graphics card as an engraving, line by line, and the shadows move when the draught catches the candle. Only the flame and the eyes of the head have colour. The head speaks with the voice of S.A.M., the speech program from 1982 that the terminal's vocoder command also uses, pushed through resonators that open and close with its jaw. Every answer is a quotation from an old book: Nostradamus in the English of 1672, Mother Shipton, the proverbs John Heywood collected in 1546, the spirits of John Dee, and after midnight Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft.

Wake the friar in time and a drawer slides out of the pedestal. The head becomes a vocoder with twenty bands and three carriers that you play with the mouse, a finger or a computer keyboard laid out like a tracker, and you can save a take as a 24-bit WAV to use in your own tracks. A broken head stays broken until you work the bellows and cast a new one, and every new head carries one more seam.

Start here: The Brazen Head. It lives under the menu Curiosa, Lloyd's Wunderkammer, next to the Scriptorium.