an audio library that ships with a sequencer.
Potatoslicer is two pieces shipped together: a Python audio engine you can import into anything, and a pygame sequencer that drives it. Open source, pip-installable, songs are plain JSON.
why
Most music-software stacks are walled gardens. You can write a track in a DAW, but you can't easily import the engine into a game, a generative-art piece, a livecoding REPL, or a long-running server that renders audio on demand.
Potatoslicer flips that. The engine is a library
(pip install potatoslicer-client) with a small, boring API: load a song
JSON, get sample arrays back. The sequencer
(pip install potatoslicer) is one consumer of that library, not the
point of it.
If you'd rather skip the GUI and embed the engine in your own program, that's the supported path. The README shows it in five lines.
what's in the box
the library
- · PotatoslicerPlayer — load, play, mix, render
- · threaded ring buffer for glitch-free playback
- · five sound providers: Cadenza, Famiwave, SuperGaussKit, NightFM, WavSampler
- · songs are plain JSON files you can write by hand
- · one instrument per channel; no DAW project format
- · runs anywhere CPython runs
the sequencer
- · pygame-ce tracker UI
- · XY pad layouts you edit live
- · per-provider parameter automation
- · depends on the library — not the other way around
- · optional: skip it and use the library directly
is and isn't
is
- · an Apache-2.0 open-source project
- · a Python library you import
- · a sequencer for procedural / chip-style audio
- · file-based — songs and layouts are plain JSON
- · embeddable in games, art, livecoding, servers
- · small. the codebase reads in an afternoon
isn't
- · a DAW replacement
- · a VST / plugin host
- · an online service you log into
- · proprietary, ad-supported, or telemetry-laden
- · promising forwards-compatibility before 1.0
- · done. it's still in active development
status
potatoslicer-client: the audio engine library. Public on PyPI. The
consumer API in player.py is what we plan to keep stable; everything below it
(providers, internals) is still moving.
potatoslicer: the sequencer app. Public on PyPI. UI is iterating fast; the on-disk song format is the contract we care about most.
song format: plain JSON, one file per song, designed to be hand-editable. Backward-compatibility is best-effort pre-1.0; we'll write migrators where it matters.
hear what it sounds like
A few tracks rendered straight from JSON song files using the bundled providers.