S got me started with this website and has been a friend for years. He’s got art and a lot of writing and other stuff. Go check him out.
Hookpad
A godsend if you’re stuck somewhere without the permissions to install what you’d normally use, and you just want to doodle without learning a whole new fully-featured DAW. The free version is somewhat limited, and there are improvements they need to make to control over note length before I’d consider it a “real” tool for composition, but it gets the itch scratched.
Musical Artifacts
A new site for me, I’ve gotten some soundfonts I needed and they seem to have a lot of other stuff. Their description:
Musical Artifacts is an open source web app helping musicians to find, share and preserve the artifacts they use for music production. It’s worked on by volunteers in their free time.
and
Freesound
I use this for most of my samples.
You might ask, “why not Splice? Are you a cheapass or something? lolnoobass” and yes, I noobass, but also I don’t need all the features of Splice, they break often anyway, and I don’t really support the business model of a site taking a cut from artists just for happening to fall into the role of a highly-trafficked hub. I would be happy to pay for samples but I don’t want to support raising up a monopsony to be the sole source for them. Spotify taught us musicians nothing, I guess.
Oobabooga, KoboldAI, and KoboldAI (subreddit with instructions)
Free and open source large language model locally installable web UIs. Because fuck OpenAI, fuck AI Dungeon, and fuck the cloud.
This will give you a ChatGPT-like or AI Dungeon-like interface, without needing to rely on the good-will of these businesses. Requires a reasonably powerful GPU (I use a 1050TI with 4gb ram, you can load some ‘layers’ on to RAM and disk or run it entirely that way but it’ll be slow as shit)
KoboldAI in particular got its start after AI Dungeon showed their ass as fascist puritans going out of their way to snoop on their users and police their thoughtcrimes. Not the first, nor will it be the last time.
and
Automatic1111’s Stable Diffusion WebUI
Free and open source Stable Diffusion locally installable web UI. Because, again, fuck the cloud.