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

The code you type in an app once. After that, Import is the only button you need

The first app that can send to it is my own online TR-808. Make a beat in the browser, click Send to Live under the stem export, and every drum arrives in Live as a four-bar loop on its own track. It works from a phone too: the sounds wait on the server for up to 24 hours, until you click Import. Your Set is never touched before that click, and LA2L never changes its tempo.

The device is open source. If you build web or Android apps yourself, the developer kit and the documentation are on GitHub, so your app can get a Send to Live button as well.

Start here: Lloyd's App2Live, with the download, the install steps and the screenshots.

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.