music-genlisted

# Music Generation This skill generates music by composing it as MIDI (where Claude's music-theory knowledge is strongest), then rendering MIDI to real instrument sounds with a SoundFont. It falls back to direct waveform synthesis when no MIDI toolchain is available. ## Decision: which route? 1. **Melodies, chords, arrangements, songs** → MIDI route (default). Compose with `mido`, render with `scripts/render.sh`. Best quality, real instruments. 2. **Tones, beeps, sirens, sweeps, simple SFX** → direct synth with `sox`/`ffmpeg`. No SoundFont needed. See "Direct synthesis" below. 3. **"Generate a track that sounds like <artist/genre>" (AI text-to-music)** → this skill does NOT do that. Tell the user it needs a model (local MusicGen via `audiocraft`, or a cloud service like Suno/Replicate behind an MCP server), not system utilities, and offer to help set that up separately. ## Step 0 — Detect the toolchain (always do this first) Run the probe before composing so you know which route is viable: ```bash bash scripts/render.sh --check ``` It reports which of `fluidsynth`, `timidity`, `sox`, `ffmpeg`, `python3 + mido` are present, and whether a SoundFont was found. Do not assume tools exist — Claude Code runs on many machines. If something needed is missing, tell the user the exact install command for their OS instead of failing silently: - macOS (Homebrew): `brew install fluid-synth sox ffmpeg && pip install mido` - Debian/Ubuntu: `sudo apt install fluidsynth