Question 1

is crack head beats free?

Accepted Answer

yes to listen. listening, steering and chatting are free and need no account. everything else is pay for what you like, and every payment is a voluntary donation towards the cost of running the website and its community (AI generation, hosting, storage): uploading a record, downloading a clip or snapshot under its licence, refreshing the acid (summoning a brand-new clip for the whole room) and teaching the 303 one of your acid lines. stripe sets the floor at 30p; every 5p you give becomes an acid credit, one credit is one teach or one refresh. you can also chip in any amount with no strings at all.

Question 2

why ask for donations?

Accepted Answer

every donation is voluntary. AI generation and hosting cost money, and what you give goes towards keeping the website and the community running: generating the beats, storing the uploads, serving the stream and moderating the room. nothing you pay buys ownership of the radio or anyone else's track — it keeps the lights on, and all help is appreciated.

Question 3

what kind of music does it play?

Accepted Answer

AI-generated beats with a live in-browser 303: instrumental acid techno, acid house, breakcore, industrial, glitch, drone and dark ambient, steered live by whoever is listening.

Question 4

do i need an account?

Accepted Answer

no account is needed to listen or steer the beats. signing in with google, discord, spotify or yahoo is required to upload tracks, comment, like, react and use the live crack chat.

Question 5

can i use the beats in my own tracks?

Accepted Answer

yes, for non-commercial use. clips generated by the radio and snapshots of it are licensed cc by-nc 4.0: download, share and remix them, and credit crack head beats / noisetrance with a link to acidtechnoradio.dance. commercial use needs written permission. tracks uploaded by other people are for personal listening only unless the uploader says otherwise, and that also applies to the uploaded part of any snapshot mix — the cc licence covers only the machine-made part. see the terms, section 8.

Question 6

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 7

is the music AI-generated?

Accepted Answer

yes — the radio is AI-generated beats with a live in-browser 303. the beats and textures come from a generative audio model, Stable Audio 2.5 by Stability AI, run through fal.ai, steered by the styles listeners vote for. the 303 is different: it is a TB-303-style synth that runs live in your browser, so the acid line is cooked on your machine, not streamed from a file. training data is determined by the model provider: https://stability.ai/stable-audio. uploaded tracks are made by the people who upload them and are never used for training unless the uploader explicitly opts in (a switch on their track, off by default, withdrawable any time).

Question 8

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.