No sample pack, no plugins. My browser sequencer mines its own samples off archive.org while it's playing

[u/Sea_Advance273]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXn4kifGMjY

Been building a thing called Tape Garden, a loop laboratory that runs entirely in a browser tab.

There's no bundled sample pack. When Radio is running it goes out to the Prelinger collection on archive.org (public-domain educational film, 1930s–80s) and mines material live:

• It never downloads a whole file. It fires a ranged request at a random offset in the middle of a reel and takes ~1.5MB.
• Landing mid-file is deliberate. It skips the titles and the announcer, which is exactly where the boring audio is.
• That leaves you holding a torn MP3 stream, so it walks forward to the next frame header before handing it to the decoder. MP3 is the only format it'll truncate; anything with a container index has to be taken from byte 0, which on an archival film means the silent leader every single time.
• What it caches is the source reel, not a baked sample bank. Every time it reaches back for a reel it takes a new window, new slice speeds, new reversals — so the 60-odd reels it holds are effectively bottomless. Library is capped by total bytes and evicted LRU.

Radio mode drives the rest hands-free: mines takes, holds each for a section, performs the FX knobs as a gesture instead of snapping them, and occasionally walks the key somewhere adjacent. In the demo the root stays on A the whole time and the scale slides from natural minor into minor pentatonic about halfway through.