Hey everyone! i'm new here, but have been exploring the possibilites with OpenClaw in my own personal music business. Before I go any further, I already know it is a Cardinal Sin to use AI in music. But guess what? thats just the new rules of the game. either you follow it, or you lose.
I created an openclaw bot named Jeff in about february/march and I am completely blown away by how powerful it is and I wanted to share a few use cases and ideas I have to hopefully get the ball rolling for other musicians and producers out there. First things first, OpenClaw is VERY hard to get setup and running well long-term if you don't know what you are doing. I have rebuilt and reconfigured Jeff dozens of times and I feel like he is finally starting to work they way I want him to. The one mindset that shifted my perspective on all of this was when I stopped thinking of Jeff as a 'robot living on my computer' (dont get mad at me, i know thats not how it really works) and started thinking of him as an employee/business partner. Mindset is everything when getting started. If you go into this wanting an employee or assistant, then set it up as such and try to approach your bot with that same mindset. When it comes to LLMs, I have yet to find the 'best' one for music production. I have just been going based on my budget, trying to save as much money as possible and only paying for what I really need (still, I suggest to be cautious about free models to a certain degree).
Something about music that has been an ongoing issue is how *slow* it is to catch up to technology. for example, UAD and IK Multimedia have been around for a long time and are two of the most popular plugin manufacturers out there. The biggest issue I have had with both of them, as well as with other companies, is that they force you to download all of their plugins even if you only own a handful (IK Multimedia does this but only for their T-Racks plugins). There are few apps out there than can accurately remove any unwanted UAD plugins and none I have seen for the T-Racks plugins. Most producers nowadays use plugins and have a massive plugin library (mine was sitting at close to 2.5k plugins just a few days ago) yet they have no one to manage it. In fact, most studios I have been to have completely mismanaged plugin libraries, full of cracked, broken, shitty, outdated, or unused plugins. And the uninstallation process is brutal, especially if you have not kept good track of what you actually use. And having an intern clean up your library can cause some massive issues in the future, ESPECIALLY with past sessions.
All that being said, training Jeff to be my AAX Plugin Manager (still incorporating him into AU and VST3) has been a life saver and something I dont think I could ever give up. Jeff understands my plugins, from a technical side, far better than I nor any engineer I know understands and he knows how to manage them. Since I do music and have no experience programming or anything, I wish I could offer more insight from a technical side but that just isnt my strong suit. Either way, below is what I have gotten Jeff to do and kind of how I did it. If I can figure out how to turn this into a downloadable skill for clawhub or something, then ill do that.
- Using the stock AAX plugins folder, I taught Jeff how to move plugins back and forth
- Had him create a master CSV for me that he will use to quickly move things around
- Dedicated path, manufacturer, alternatives, character, latest version, update available and active/inactive sections were added to the CSV for on the fly information ("what UAD plugins are active", "What other plugins do I have that have a similar character to the Scheps 73 plugin")
- Dedicated usage tracking via ptx session files (still building this out fully. dont know what other DAWs can do this but highly recommend giving a try)
Overall, if you are a musician or a producer, having an agent will help you in the long run, at least for management purposes. Yes, AI art = still bad. So have AI do the non-art stuff. Anyone else got any use cases similar to this? Any tech guys want to criticize my lack of knowledge on this subject?