Music for Programming (opens in new tab)

Very cool website and ideas, but an easy go-to programming music option is video game soundtracks, especially older ones. They're designed to be background music and many of them are so good.

Great idea!

I like dub techno and minimal berlin-school downtempo for coding myself, and I recently did a pre-release of some myself that is 100% sequenced in Scheme!

Tremendous Machine - The McCarthy Church Orchestra Vol 1. (ba doom cha) https://soundcloud.com/iain-duncan/sets/mccarthy-church-orch...

Composed and produced with Scheme for Max running Ableton Live https://github.com/iainctduncan/scheme-for-max https://www.youtube.com/c/musicwithlisp

I made a 117hr Spotify playlist for coding specifically. The music generally has to meet the following criteria:

1. No lyrics. Words distract me (small little mouth sounds are fine).

2. Mid-tempo. Anything too fast gives me anxiety and anything too slow puts me to sleep. To stay in 'the zone,' I need to keep my heart rate at a certain BPM, so the music reflects that. Some variability is fine, but no extremes.

3. Nothing too 'interesting.' If it's taking my attention away from work, it's no good for me.

What resulted from this is my ever-evolving ultimate "coffee shop"-style playlist, which I tend to add 10-30+ hrs to every year. A healthy mix of electronic/acoustic that goes all over the world and is designed always to be shuffled.

It keeps me sane.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6t9a4XQ4ZLOT5D5X3ENXCO?si=...

It's a fun little interface. It's nice that they offer podcast versions too, but a spotify playlist would be even better

This website has been providing high-quality music for free since at least 2011. Good job.