The story behind CedarGroove

Hi, I'm Paul. I'm an electrical engineer by training, a drum & bass producer by night, and I love building tools, digital and analog. CedarGroove started as a question I could not leave alone: could a neural network learn the rhythmic DNA of drum patterns well enough to continue a groove convincingly?

The first answer was a Jupyter notebook. Google's Magenta had shown that networks could generate drum sequences; I wanted genre awareness, style presets, groove templates and a real-time MIDI engine, so the notebook became a native macOS app with a WebView UI, and the app became this site. Along the way I trained a drum transcriber so the loop you drop lands on the grid as editable hits, which is still the tool I am proudest of.

Then people asked for the rest: split a song into stems, pull a bass line or a vocal into MIDI, find a key and a tempo. Each of those is a tool here now, all running on one server I keep, with no third-party cloud touching your audio.

CedarGroove stays free for as long as I can keep the lights on. The models are mine, the server is mine, and the bills are small enough that I would rather earn your feedback than your card number. A download asks for an email once per browser; that is the whole deal, and you can leave the list with one click.

If that changes one day, it will be a plan for heavy use, never a wall in front of the tools you use today. I am dedicated to music and cool software, and this site is where the two meet.

The tools, for people who work with drums and songs: the drum transcriber and the drum generator built on my own models, an audio-to-MIDI converter for pitched instruments, a stem splitter with one page per job, and a key and BPM finder. How they work is written up under Technology; what changed and when is in the changelog.

I am probably digging through record crates for obscure jungle breaks, soldering something, or tweaking a synth patch. DnB was the first genre the generator learned for exactly that reason. This project sits where everything I care about overlaps: signal processing, machine learning and making music.

Ideas, bug reports, a tool you wish existed: the feedback page reaches me directly and I read every message. Anything about your data goes to privacy@cedargroove.com.