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Show HN: TB-303 Synth, Drum Machine and Sequencer in Web Audio

238 pointsby errozeroover 8 years ago

14 comments

djaychelaover 8 years ago
That is very cool! Just spent a bit of time playing with it, and while I wouldn&#x27;t say I was a 303&#x2F;808 connoisseur (unlike a friend who is pretty famous for his use of them), sounds pretty good to me; it&#x27;s not perfect (it sounds like the filters aren&#x27;t quite there in terms of extreme settings of resonance and envelope), but it&#x27;s good. I&#x27;ve not used RB338 for years, so it could be mis-remembering, but it&#x27;s almost like the sounds need controls that &#x27;go to 11&#x27; to get to where you&#x27;d want them to be?<p>I like the simplicity of it and the ease of producing a WAV from a session, and the UI seems to be simple and straightforward to use. I&#x27;ll test it out on some students this week, see what they come up with.<p>I have a couple of minor criticisms - I don&#x27;t think the ballistics of the rotary controls is right, but I can&#x27;t quite put my finger on -why-, just seems a bit too sensitive or there&#x27;s something about the linearity of it? Would it be possible to add the Cubase-style &quot;shift reduces the sensitivity while dragging&quot; to them?<p>The other thing was editing the grid - I&#x27;d prefer left click to toggle an event on and off rather than right-click to clear; while this is personal preference, it&#x27;s one that I&#x27;ve got used to using Cubase for 20 years or so in the drum editor, so it&#x27;s a little counter-intuitive to have to do it another way, and I think many other editors are similar?<p>Finally, any chance of an undo in the editor?<p>But overall, love it. An amazing demonstration of what&#x27;s possible in a browser, and of your skills!
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errozeroover 8 years ago
Hey HN, this is something I have been working on for most of this year. It started out as a more fully featured web-based daw that would have lots of different instruments with its own plugin format. I got quite far into the project and built a very modular system so it is easy to create more instruments by just dropping in a js file and a view file for the visuals.<p>It was taking longer than I thought so I decided to create a V2 of my old Acid Machine app using this code as a base.<p>It&#x27;s great to see people talking about it after being hidden away on my laptop for so long. If anyone has any technical questions, I would love to answer them. Also.. I am on the lookout for some freelance work at the moment.
racl101over 8 years ago
Awesome! Brings back memories of playing with Rebirth. Love the different design.<p>Boy I still remember playing with Propellerhead Rebirth in the late &#x27;90s and that was pretty great at the time. It made me a bit of money in high school to simply create some basslines and burn them onto a CD for friends.<p>By the time Reason 3.0 came out I stopped playing with this kind of software and only really used tools like Audacity for editing sound files. But also, my taste for Electronic music had died down. It had become very generic for me for the most part.<p>Still though, it&#x27;s cool to a web version of this software and the amazing things you can do with HTML5.
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vdnkhover 8 years ago
Wow this is awesome! I&#x27;m building something similar with WebMIDI and WebAudio and I&#x27;ve been blocked trying to get recording to work. My current solution is sampling my OscillatorNodes with a MediaRecorder and turning the resulting blob into an .ogg file but it only works in Firefox (Chrome has a bug with decoding ogg with WebAudio). Do you mind elaborating on how you do your wav recording?
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dharma1over 8 years ago
Nice work! Web Audio has come on a lot.<p>ABL3 still sounds better to me, but it&#x27;s no surprise, Mike (the guy who wrote it) has made analog emulation his obsession for years.<p>Also, if you&#x27;re in the market for actual analog hardware, I picked one of these up earlier this year, great juicy sounding little box, cheap as chips.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thomann.de&#x2F;gb&#x2F;mam_mb33_retro.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thomann.de&#x2F;gb&#x2F;mam_mb33_retro.htm</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Bb9C7NRCmZ4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Bb9C7NRCmZ4</a>
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jkrippyover 8 years ago
This took me a minute to figure out so writing it down in case it helps someone else. The sequencer button allows you to string your patterns together into a song. To actually play them in that sequence though, you need to click the &quot;Pattern Mode&quot; grey button at the top of the screen and toggle it to &quot;Song Mode&quot;. Then, the play button (or spacebar) will play your song in that pattern.
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exDM69over 8 years ago
Very nice. Sounds quite good and works very well. I tested it with Firefox 50 on Linux. No audio issues of any kind.<p>Is there a way to use the keyboard to control the synth and the knobs? I grew up with trackers (and later Jeskola Buzz) and I always enjoyed playing with synths using a &quot;keyboard piano&quot; input.
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pistleover 8 years ago
This is very good work in this space. Rebirth 338 was the bees knees tipping point for virtual analog on a PC. We have been seeing numerous things that hint at the direction of where things can end up and this is a good way to establish cred for browser-based audio generation.<p>Generally good piano roll implementation, controls. It&#x27;d be nice to have a master fader and possibly a compressor amongst the effects implmemented.<p>I&#x27;d also love a swing parameter.<p>Something I&#x27;ve noticed is that knobs with a touch screen can be rough since your digit is covering the visual feedback. Maybe a single vertical line indicator next to the knob could mean you would know where you are and how far you can go when tweaking one?
vincentriemerover 8 years ago
This is awesome! Now if only there was a web-protocol for syncing the audio clocks of two webapps I could really jam out with this and (shameless plug) <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;io808.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;io808.com</a> together.
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hoorayimhelpingover 8 years ago
Love it so much. Going to go home and play with this for a few hours. Thank you for making this and sharing it.
CamperBob2over 8 years ago
Can&#x27;t say I&#x27;m a fan of the skeuomorphic rotary knobs that don&#x27;t even work like rotary knobs, but like vertical sliders.
wazooxover 8 years ago
Works perfectly well for me in Firefox 50&#x2F;Linux, on a 5 years old machine :)
rcbuseover 8 years ago
Having flashbacks to using Rebirth-338
senorjazzover 8 years ago
it &quot;looks&quot; a lot better than it did, but I have no idea what is going on. Used to play around with the old version quite a lot when bored at work :)<p>I guess I was just used to how it worked before, this re-design of multiple full screen views is confusing, couldn&#x27;t figure out how to get things to play, quick live edits don&#x27;t seem possible now either.
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