Esa Ruoho

Live at the Live Ambient Festival, Pori — 2025

I identify a pattern of manual labour, organise it into an underlying principle, and that principle becomes a tool. The domain changes; the principle doesn't — a Bulletin Board System (BBS) in 1992 and an agentic browser in 2026 are the same principle, 34 years apart.

I don't work by job title — I'm an interpreter: I feel what's missing in a system and build the thing that fixes it. In QA that makes me the person who closes the gap between what a product is meant to do and what it actually does — sitting between designer, developer, and AI, not siloed off filing tickets. (How I work →)

Music as Lackluster and in the duo HLER; workflow tools for trackers (Paketti for Renoise, plus Impulse Tracker and zTracker Prime); two decades of free-energy / LENR archiving, since 2004.

Curriculum vitae: full CV.

Music

Lackluster — solo electronic music, 1996–present
Discography — all 268 releases (solo, EPs & compilation appearances)
Gigs & live performances — 206 shows, 1996–present
HLER — ambient-drone duo with Heikki Lindgren, since 2018
Press — 87 reviews, 24 interviews & 84 news items (Igloo Magazine, Textura, Cyclic Defrost, Gonzo Circus, The Sound Projector, Avant Music News, Merchants of Air, DasFilter, …)
Q&A — 55 questions from listeners, answered (2011–2014)
Newsletter archive — 34 lackluster announcement issues, 2001–2008, in full
What 6.9 Million Streams Actually Pays — streaming-transparency & direct support (live)

Awards

Zebrain — Outstanding Technical Achievement, The Meteoriks 2019 — Outstanding Technical Achievement, The Meteoriks 2019 (for the Zebrain soundtrack, composed in Soundbox)
Esa Ruoho — Demoscene Competition Placings — 22 international demoscene competition placings (1998–2019), 5 international 1st-place wins
Demoscene productions — 41 demos scored (handle Distance), 1996–2019, each linked to its pouet.net entry (Zebrain took 1st at Demosplash 2019)

Documentary soundtracks & performances

Documentary Soundtracks — 5 documentaries (2016–2024), most directed by Ruby Carat for Cold Fusion Now!
performances — 6 dance / installation works (2001–2019), Helsinki / Turku / Reykjavík / Netherlands

Tracker tools

Paketti — Renoise workflow suite (8,000+ shortcuts, 150+ dialogs, 1,587 commits)
pakettiformats — Paketti's import/export engine (.REX/.RX2/.SF2/.PTI)
Impulse Tracker — my own build and fork (v2.354) of Jeffrey Lim's original IT DOS source (x86 assembly; a solo effort, fixing issues found using IT since 1997), adding external MIDI sync, multitimbral MIDI-in, pattern→sample WAV render, order-list power tools, and whole-song/per-channel multi-WAV export (229 commits)
zTracker Prime — 6502-targeted multi-platform MIDI tracker/sequencer (contributor — 139 merged PRs, the largest of his open-source surfaces)

Software & tools (own work)

Apple Automation Suite — macOS automation workflows in AppleScript, Automator, Shortcuts, App Intents & JXA; open-source continuation of Apple's eliminated Automation-PM role (288 Automator workflows, 68 scripting dictionaries, 19 bulk exporters, 65+ CLI tools, menu-bar app, Siri/voice integration)
github-cloner — Claude Code skill (2026–Present) — meta-skill that generates Claude Code development skills from any repository
PDFWorkshop — split-screen OCR workbench (Tesseract + Gemini + GLM-OCR), searchable-PDF export
whisp — Whisper transcriber with hallucination delooping + YouTube caption merging
discord-archiver — whitelabel Discord channel archiver
sessions — unified TUI session picker across Claude Code / Copilot / Codex
paraEQ — parametric EQ in C++
matkalasku — fills, signs & bakes a Finnish travel-expense claim as a one-page PDF from the command line (Python, no cloud, data in a gitignored .env)

Free-energy / archiving tools

Free Energy / LENR — the Work — since 2004: the MERLib archive, Cold Fusion Now! soundtracks & podcast, translation, lectures
MERLib Mirror — mirroring modern energy research into a public library (28 merged PRs)
ColdFusionCalendar — interactive cold-fusion/LENR chronology, 255+ events
state-dependent-coefficients — interactive EE teaching tool (the "constants" are state-dependent)
LENR Academy — Contributor (2025–Present) — contributor to the LENR research platform, 2025–present (36 merged PRs)

Open-source contributions (forks & upstreams)

CircuitJS1 — Contributor (2025–Present) — contributor to Paul Falstad's in-browser circuit simulator (45 merged PRs)
soundbox — code fixes (build, bugs, features) to the open-source HTML5 tracker, while composing the Meteoriks-winning Zebrain soundtrack
AbletonOSC — contributor to AbletonOSC (Ableton Live 12 over OSC), active PRs
Surge — volunteer software tester (built a builder for it, bug reporting, preset hunting, PDF manual → Markdown), 2019

Employment & engagements

Available for projects since June 2026.

Cognitive Design & User Experience Evaluator — Ray Browser Ltd (Feb 2024 – Jun 2026): UX testing, feature-building, and R&D into agentic automation of a Chromium-based AI browser
Softability — Senior Quality Engineer (2019–2024), three client engagements: XReach (2019–2021), Warner Bros. Discovery / HBO Max (2021–2022), Aiforia (2023)
- Highlight: on HBO Max, built a solo bash/ADB automation that audited thousands of episodes on AndroidTV — surfaced a critical PG-18-in-children's-profiles content-rating defect and hundreds of localization bugs.
Ellie Technologies — freelance QA + copywriting (2019–2023)
Pixelface — WebVR / browser-VR QA & support (2017–2019)
SongHi Entertainment — audio implementation & IT, Pure Data engine (2009–2014)
Bits Evolving — Finnish iOS localisation (2016)
Riot Entertainment — systems engineer, SMS mobile games (2001–2002)
Konepsykologi — Apple training & 1-on-1 support (2011–present)

Game testing & QA

Wadjet Eye Games — iOS game testing for the NYC adventure-game studio (volunteer)
Heavyweight Rex — manual QA + regression, Unity 3D game (2017–2023)
Grand Cru — QA intern on Battlejack (Unity 3D), 2016
Two decades of game/app QA across iOS, Android, VR and desktop — full list in the CV

Other & earlier experience

Cloudcity BBS — System Operator (1992–2000): running a bulletin board at 13 — message/file boards, online games, art & music competitions, worldwide messaging networks
Minä Olen Messut — web assistant & Apple tutor (2011–2020)
SongHi Entertainment — audio implementation, Pure Data engine, Scrum master (2009–2014)
Johtoääni Oy — studio intern, audio editing & production (2007–2008)
Helsingin Työttömät HeTy ry — publicist, social media & CMS migration (2015–2017)
Finnish Association of Living Food — desktop publisher, InDesign newsletter (2008–2009)
Dolce Italia Ry — graphic designer, logo (2009)

Writing

Kauan odotettu Renoise v3.5 — Mitä uutta? — "Kauan odotettu Renoise v3.5 — Mitä uutta?", a 4-page feature (text + photos) in Skrolli 2026.1, Finland's computer-culture magazine
Vesi on elävä organismi! Viktor Schaubergerin elämä — "Vesi on elävä organismi! Viktor Schaubergerin elämä", feature on Viktor Schauberger in Minä Olen -lehti, 2012

Lectures

Paketti technical demonstration — Paketti technical demonstration, Synthcamp, Kemiö, 2025
Kuuluuko vapaa ja loppumaton energia lähitulevaisuuteemme? — Kuuluuko vapaa ja loppumaton energia lähitulevaisuuteemme?, Rajatiedon Keskus, Helsinki, 2016
Obscure Vibrations in Electronic Music — Obscure Vibrations in Electronic Music, University of Helsinki, 2006
Netlabels & Tracker-based music composition — Netlabels & Tracker-based music composition, Ars Electronica, Austria, 2001

Seeking & building

Replicate the Zyklus MIDI Performance System 1 — understanding and rebuilding the rare real-time MIDI performance instrument.
Wanted: a Steorn USB Hall probe — I don't own one; if you do, esaruoho@gmail.com">get in touch.

More: Seeking & building →.

In this section

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musicfolder
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Esa Ruoho - Cover Lettercover-letter
Esa Ruoho — Seeking & Buildingpage
Fleet — see all your Macs in one windowpage
Free Energy / LENR — Esa Ruoho's Workdomain
How I worksynthesis