How we finally landed on Level Rebel
The name Level Rebel came after years of private tools, months of false starts, and one week where the name kept getting better instead of worse.
Brian Arbuckle
Build in Public
Founder notes on the long path from private audio workflow tools to Level Rebel.
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Apr 28, 2026
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ChatGPT changed the rewrite, but not the taste
In 2025, ChatGPT helped me turn rough C++ and early Rust into better Rust. The real advantage was not speed. It was finally having leverage without losing taste.
Sep 15, 2025 -
The year the tool pile started acting like a product
By mid-2022, my private audio tools had multiplied, the GUI experiments were getting serious, and I was starting to move C++ ideas into Rust by hand.
Jul 15, 2022 -
The point where Python stopped being enough
In 2019, I started moving pieces of my personal audio workflow out of Python and into C++. It was not elegant, but it was the next honest step.
Jul 15, 2019 -
When Audio Chop Shop started showing up every day
After trying PyQt and Kivy, I landed on Tkinter and Audio Chop Shop became part of my normal client mixing workflow.
Jul 16, 2018 -
The notebook years before Audio Chop Shop
By 2016, the audio tools were still notebooks, but they were useful enough to become part of real work.
Aug 18, 2016 -
The audio scripts before Level Rebel had a name
Before Audio Chop Shop or Level Rebel, I was writing small tools to solve annoying audio workflow problems for myself.
Sep 30, 2013