I’ve been consulting with Toronto machine learning startup Dessa on an exciting audio based project. (more on that when the time is right)

The he engineers there have impressed me with what they’ve been able to accomplish in terms of analyzing and processing audio despite their inexperience working with audio in general. The experience has inspired me to get my feet wet with Python, the very popular and accessible programming language.

One of the best resources so far has been the book Learn Python 3 the Hard Way. I bought a paperback copy but the entire contents of the book are available for free on the author’s website. So far I’ve done 20 of the 52 exercises and I already feel empowered by what I’ve learned. With countless open-source libraries available for free online and by calling on them in simple scripts, a user can do some serious automating of mundane tasks.

It’ll be interesting to see if I can put these to use in a music workflow. Client budgets are always tight. I’ve already found that I can save myself a lot of repetitive stress by automating tasks with the help of Keyboard Maestro. It saves me a lot of repetitive stress (fewer clicks!) and ultimately saves my clients money by making my workflow more efficient.