Fake Music Generator
I had an awesome idea the other day: create my own computer generated music by using Markov chains and MIDI files. “I’m a genius! Nobody has ever thought of this before,” I said to myself. I registered FakeMusicGenerator.com and planned on looking into it later. Well turns out everybody has thought of this before. Oh well. I already had the domain so I went for it.
I ended up taking the lazy route and used some existing free code I found to generate music. I then converted to MP3 using a fancy SoundFont (I never knew that sounds had fonts but I guess it makes sense) so they would sound better than a MIDI.
I took it a step further and added fake track names, album titles, and artist names. I even added computer generated art for the album cover. I think it is shaping up pretty well.
Anyways, if you are bored and need some free instrumental music (maybe for a YouTube video or something), then feel free to check out the Fake Music Generator.
Dude, I love this. I hope your site stays up forever. If you need money to keep it up Let me know. This is treasure! Thanks for your hard work!
What soundfont are you using? The pianos are fairly good.
i was looking for something like this and i’ve been using it tons! i even discovered a random song that i fell in love with! http://www.fakemusicgenerator.com/download.php?artist=Brenda+Hunter&track=Wishes+Via+Email&type=mp3 between this and a few other sites, i’ve got all the tools i need to start making my own random fictitious physical CDs to give as gifts and whatnot.
P.S. a quick question though: what program is being used to generate the random artwork? there’s a site called random-art.org but the images there are higher res and don’t look the same, but the site does generate art based on random text entered on it, so maybe it’s something that could be incorporated… also, the only thing that bothers me a little is that the mp3s aren’t tagged with the info generated and the files aren’t physically numbered, so the tracks get all out of order. but anyway, thanks for what is there! i love making fake albums to listen to! there should be a service where one can buy randomly generated albums on physical media! you wouldn’t be paying for the music and art, you’d be buying the physical materials used to make it…
The art is generated using various PHP and shell scripts. It is all pre-generated though because it is a rather slow process.
The MP3s aren’t tagged because they are also pre-generated. Page load times would be horrendous if the music was generated on-the-fly. I could modify it to put the track number at the beginning of the filename though. I’ll look into doing that later today.
That would be great, thank you! I was playing around with track links recently and found out you can type in pretty much anything in the track name and artist fields and get songs, not just the albums generated through the site itself. For example, I entered LINKIN PARK as the artist and one of their song titles, and I got a song, and I entered my actual name and the title This Is My Song, and I got one, and so I was wondering how titles and names determine what song you get, and I was wondering if a Fake Compilation Generator or maybe even a Fake Discography Generator might be possible in the future?
I’ve updated the code to write ID3 tags. I’ve also added track numbers to the filename.
There are 8,000 pre-generated songs. The track and artist names are used to seed a Mersenne twister. This allows me to get the same random song from the 8,000 pre-generated songs, but always return the same song based on the track/artist combo.
I hadn’t thought of doing a fake compilation or discography generator. Sounds fun though, I’ll definitely put it on the list as future features for the Fake Music Generator.
Thanks for the feedback!
I saw the updated URL strings today. Thanks again for adding the new features! It really feels good to contribute to something I’m enjoying so much! Now I only wish there was a program I could download and run to do all this on my system… I know “cgmusic” is available, but that’s only for the music generation by itself, as far as I’m aware, and I’m running a Linux OS and am not sure how well it would run via Wine, but anywho, I’ll continue using the website and recommend it to people often. And again, thanks again!
I’m sorry, I have one more question/feature request: Would it be possible to add a “download album as ZIP” function to the site? That would be a huge help to a lot of users, I imagine.
I’ll add it to the list of future improvements. Probably won’t add it soon though. It is a bit of a low traffic project, so low on the priority list.
This is the most amazing thing I’ve seen in ages. And it all seems to work so seamlessly. Very impressed.