Um... Holy crap! WOW! JamCorder!

I've written about this sort of idea recently, only I was wondering about doing it with my multitrack and a sort of "kansas city standard," tone shift keying for MIDI. I'd also been wondering about having a separate track for each MIDI channel, or multiple, multichannel tracks. So I started researching the necessary standard libraries for Arduino, the interfacing... the madness sets in...

Then Floyd Steinberg pops up in my youtube feed promoting this little gadget...

Apart from somebody having already done what I wanted, this does it better because, give this the biggest SD card it can read and write, and it'll record everything you play, timestamped at starts and stops (stops after 3 seconds) for the rest of your life! Cool! I can ditch my MIDIcorder project, save up a few pennies (nearly 300000 australian "pennies", AU$293) and my scope is exceded.

What this thing does is, when your piano, synth or, in my case, guitar synth is plugged in, it records every note you play and, after 3 seconds of no notes, timestamps the last note and waits for another one. Go and make that cuppa, chat to the better half when they call, clean up a glug of catsick, ah, peace, back to the studio to noodle again... Pretty much forever! For about US$150 plus freight, hence to me, it 3 * yankee / aussie plus obscene US to Australia postage and GST. For a box smaller than a VHS cassette. The postage back the other way is a few bucks. You don't see DOGE fixing that "inefficiency" do you? However, I paid nearly that much a for MIDI splitter from China recently, sooooo... Tools cost money, the ones you want the most cost more. We do this to ourselves, frankly.

Besides, this is cool tech and it is the best way I can imagine to get every noodle you play scored for reaudition and arrangement later. Stick it to the back of a portable keyboard, a control surface, a pad matrix, my YouRock MIDI guitar, use it on the train. You know? Lightweight gear for noodling anywhere. The musical equivalent of carrying a sketchbook and pencils or water colours, right? That has got to be worth the ticket price of a drum'n'bass toy, like a 606, right?

It well is for me.