Question 1

is crack head beats free?

Accepted Answer

yes. listening, steering the generator, chatting and uploading are free. downloads are pay-what-you-like, from £0.

Question 2

what kind of music does it play?

Accepted Answer

generated instrumental acid techno, acid house, IDM, breakcore, industrial, glitch, drone and dark ambient, steered live by whoever is listening.

Question 3

do i need an account?

Accepted Answer

no account is needed to listen or steer the beats. a google sign-in is required to upload tracks, comment, like, react and use the live crack chat.

Question 4

can i use the beats in my own tracks?

Accepted Answer

generated radio clips are licensed cc by-nc 4.0: you can download, share, remix and perform them for non-commercial use as long as you credit “crack head beats / noisetrance” and link back to acidtechnoradio.dance. commercial use needs our permission. a mix that blends in someone’s upload stays under that uploader’s rights (personal, non-commercial listening only), so check with them first. see the terms.

Question 5

is there a mobile app?

Accepted Answer

there is no app, but the site works in your phone’s browser. on iPhone and Android you need to tap “start the radio” once because browsers block autoplay. on android the radio keeps playing with the screen locked or the tab in the background. on iPhone, safari pauses the acid when you lock the screen or switch apps, so keep the tab open and the screen on. if you hear nothing on an iPhone, check the ring/silent switch on the side — when it is set to silent it can mute the generated audio, so flip it to ring.

Question 6

what is a TB-303?

Accepted Answer

the roland TB-303 bass line is a small silver synthesizer from 1981 that was meant to stand in for a bass guitarist and failed at it completely. it has one oscillator (sawtooth or square), a resonant low-pass filter, an envelope with accent and slide, and a fiddly step sequencer. when second-hand units turned up cheap in chicago in the mid-80s, producers cranked the resonance and twisted the cutoff while the sequence ran, and the squelching, liquid sound that came out became acid house, then acid techno. crack head beats runs a software 303-style synth inside your browser: a procedural sequencer feeding a resonant filter with accent and slide, so the acid line is cooked live on your machine, not streamed from a file. the res and glitch controls on the radio are the modern equivalent of grabbing those two knobs.

acid techno snapshots: frozen from the live radio