AudioMass – free, open source, web-based Audio and Waveform editor

Hello hackernews!<p>I am the author! Wow, I can&#x27;t believe the attention this is getting! Hopefully this proves to be useful as a tool, and not just as a JS demo! :)<p>The next plans are - redo drawing library to further improve performance! - polish a bit some audio plugins (like the paragraphic EQ) since some parts feel a bit off (the limiter, paragraphic eq for example). - Add some tutorials! Some things might not be straightforward like using Shift + [keys] for shortcuts etc. - Easier recording mode (like the ability to open a new empty audio project) - Multitrack mode, for more channels! - play a bit more with the concept of having different windows that can be in different screens (check out the frequency analyzer under &quot;view&quot;)<p>To answer a few questions, I plan to have a very open license this is just a fun side project for me. but I need to figure out the licenses of some libs I am using first (eg wavesurfer, lzma-wasm) and do proper attribution!<p>Thanks again!<p>PS. I wrote this in 2018, and just kept it on my hard disk until recently, so certain features might be slightly different than back then :)

Author again here! Now that this is finally sunsetting, I feel a bit more comfortable writing some things I &#x27;ve learnt today!<p>- First of all, I am amazed at the suggestions and love this is getting. I have been dog fooding it by using it to quickly edit foley audio from a tascam hand-microphone device, in order to make some cheap sound effects for a game project I am working on. The point is, I thought I was aware of all bugs, and all areas of improvement, and I am humbled to have my mind opened and see how valuable outside perspectives are! It&#x27;s so easy get tunnel vision and think you know best I guess.<p>- Secondly... as I said I wrote this in June 2018, and just... kept it... I guess I was afraid of sharing it to the world, perhaps the audio people would get mad at me for making mistakes with the audio api (like the fade in&#x2F;fade out being linear). Perhaps the javascript people would make fun of me for just using Vanilla JS.<p>But if this is impressive in 2020, imagine how impressive it would have been back in 2018! So I guess my point is. Share your work! Do not be afraid to put it out there!<p>- If anyone is interested on how it is built, and how the interface complexities are managed, even though it is just plain old school JS that has the reputation of being notoriously difficult to maintain, I would be happy to make a write-up shortly, or perhaps give a talk on it.<p>- Third... (hopefully that is ok). If you like AudioMass, and like the way it is built and it performs, perhaps you might enjoy working together with me. We are doing cutting edge computer vision, and well.. some CRUD stuff too! My company is hiring (info in my profile). But please be advised that due to covid-19 things may take longer or may not be fully up to date.<p>PS. As for license, I will probably choose something like &quot;wtfpl.net&quot;. if it can help you learn something, or build something, go ahead! If you noticed, the page doesn&#x27;t have any tracking (I realy don&#x27;t know how many visitors came (I also disabled nginx logs)). And of course no ads at all. I &#x27;m just trying to build cool and useful stuff!

Was <i>really</i> not expecting to be impressed by this, but it&#x27;s excellent. The inclusion of a spectrogram is a very nice touch.<p>The ability to preview EQ changes while the audio is playing back is impresssive, although the x-axis scale on the parametric isn&#x27;t helpful - everything below 1kHz is squashed into the left-most 10% of the plot.<p>Some small nitpicks are that it&#x27;s currently quite fiddly to use the compressor without a gain reduction meter, and my usual bugbear with simpler audio editors: that fade-outs are almost never useful unless you can alter the curve.<p>But the fact that this is working so smoothly in a browser at all, and in Firefox to boot, is really commendable.

We have Photopea (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.photopea.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.photopea.com&#x2F;</a>) for images, and now we have AudioMass for audio. I love these open source, web based tools that work fantastic. Great job!

Wow, that&#x27;s fantastic... one thing I noticed instantly is that (to me) the UI&#x2F;UX is so intuitive. I use Audacity a lot, and the UI on that for core operations: zooming, unzooming, trimming, selecting... is so much more clunky (I can never figure out how to &quot;unzoom&quot;) - it drives me mad every time.<p>This one one intuitive and natural. I&#x27;d have to evaluate how file system handling worked, but just based on the UI and snappiness - I&#x27;d use this over Audacity for any quick-n-dirty audio editing tasks. Really cool!

Works great! Near-native web audio on the horizon ;)<p>High Performance Web Audio with AudioWorklet in Firefox 76<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hacks.mozilla.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;high-performance-web-audio-with-audioworklet-in-firefox&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hacks.mozilla.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;high-performance-web-audio...</a>

This is the GitHub repo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pkalogiros&#x2F;audiomass" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pkalogiros&#x2F;audiomass</a> (accessible under the &quot;help&quot; menu)

It appears the entire app was written with vanilla JS. That&#x27;s just an observation. I wouldn&#x27;t have expected that nowadays.<p>The app is super impressive!

Reminds me of the audio editor that shipped with Windows...95? Had some great times with that thing reversing everything in earshot, doing reverse reverb etc etc<p>edit: this thing <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;UXqSteO.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;UXqSteO.png</a>

Please forgive me for being self-centered. I <i>DO</i> think AudioMass is great. I&#x27;m running it locally and I even contributed by posting a legit issue in github. But here&#x27;s the self-centered part: The other day I posted a &quot;Show HN&quot; for something web audio related that I wrote and got crickets so I&#x27;d like to try again: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ctrager.github.io&#x2F;music_tools" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ctrager.github.io&#x2F;music_tools</a>. Especially check out &quot;Pitch Detector&quot;. All three tools are standalone single HTML files that don&#x27;t need a server.

My first thought: add WebRTC voice chat and the ability to record all participants in separate channels... would be awesome for podcast recording!

8&#x2F;10, very promising. feels like Cooledit&#x2F;Audition, which was for a long time the best of its class (Pro T Tools is the industry standard but that&#x27;s based on long years of hardware-lock-in). Allow local instances and add Lua or similar user scripting and you&#x27;ve got a winner. Well done.

May I ask, what the sample music is? Sounds like a movie score but Shazam doesn&#x27;t recognizes it.

I open Audacity about once every 3 months for some random audio editing, this is definitely a better&#x2F;more intuitive app. Plus web based is awesome for something I use so infrequently. Great Work!

Very cool! I tried doing some signal processing stuff back in the day and got absolutely discouraged after discovering how much linear algebra was involved.<p>I particularly appreciate the ability to preview compression. Compression is probably what I use most when I&#x27;m editing audio and having that at my fingertips without loading Audacity or Ableton would be super nice for quick, rough changes.<p>One thing that I&#x27;d really like to see would be a de-essing plugin, or even better a multiband compressor.

These are the exact tools I am constantly looking for. Full browser sandbox for no stress &quot;install&quot;, local-first, offline-first, so you own your own data - then option for locally encrypted cloud backups. I am almost 100% web now, I use very few installed programs and am constantly trying to get that to zero. One day someone is going to collect all these best-in-class web tools and make a proper chromebook where the user owns their own data.

This would make a good Electron app so it can also be used offline by regular people who don&#x27;t want to or are unable to fuss with command line web servers.

I dabble from time to time with <i>mixin rekids</i>, and am presently trying to find an audio editor for simple cut n paste that <i>Audacity</i>. Must support MacOS.<p>What&#x27;s is out there? My DuckFu is letting me down in this instance.<p>I&#x27;ll give AudioMass a spin over the weekend, and like others have said if it could be a standalone Electron-based app that would probably work, and happy to throw a few antipodean dineros at it.

Features vs page load time is very impressive.

Would be great if there was a VST like standard for audio effect plugins for web, so that many web-based audio apps could use the same plugins.<p>Saw something like that but for synths - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.webaudiomodules.org&#x2F;wamsynths&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.webaudiomodules.org&#x2F;wamsynths&#x2F;</a>

this brings me back to the days of cool edit pro! (Idk why!) but it is amazing that you can do that in a browser nowadays!<p>If I were to be super critical my only pet peeve has to do with the style of the menu :P The color (dark on light) seems disconnected from the rest of the app design and those big rounded corners gives the app a little bit of a toy-ish look (My point of reference for &quot;pro&quot; is something like Adobe Audition, Presonus StudioOne, Pro Tools, etc... kind of look) But that is just a personal preference (this is the radius I&#x27;m talking about <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pkalogiros&#x2F;AudioMass&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;main.css#L61" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pkalogiros&#x2F;AudioMass&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;main...</a>)<p>But the project look awesome! keep it up!

Does this load the whole file into memory while it&#x27;s being worked on? What if you tried to load a file that is too big? I wonder with these more complex productivity web-apps becoming more common, how something like a video editor might work that needs to work on data too large to put in memory.

Very nice! I&#x27;ve recently tried covering some similar ground for a side project (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forkjam.com&#x2F;new" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forkjam.com&#x2F;new</a>) so I have an idea of how much work this is.<p>I take it you took the approach of using WASM for audio decoders?

This is really cool, thanks for sharing!<p>I&#x27;m noticed my CPU fan at full blast and checked my processes (then Chrome task manager), I had left it open an it was using 80-95% CPU in the background.<p>Tested again, it seems to be the spectrum analyzer (even after I pause playback, or close the analyzer window).

This is smack in the path of Audacity, very nice work. Is it possible to load midi synchronized to an audio file? That&#x27;s a weak point in Audacity, it can&#x27;t really edit the midi as you go through the audio and for some tasks that would be extremely useful to have.

This is awesome. As an avid past user of Cool Edit 2000 and Adobe Edition 1.5, I love this project. Fantastic to see something familiar in a browser. As a bonus it hits me right in the nostalgia. I&#x27;ll be watching and supporting this!

If i could suggest anything it would be a way to make a selection while playing. Like hold down shift, press space bar, and then press space bar again, and it&#x27;s all selected.

This is great! When working with large files, I&#x27;d like zoom in&#x2F;out to be a bit snappier. I&#x27;d also like right click -&gt; zoom to selection.

Great work!!! I&#x27;ve been wanting to do something like this for a while. I&#x27;m glad someone is leveraging the web to build a real open source DAW!

Very simple, but clean, works like a charm, perfect set of effect and import&#x2F;export features. I need to check if it works as a PWA.<p>Kudos to the creator!

When I try to play the sample in Brave I only get sound for a couple of seconds before it goes quiet. In FF it works correctly.

It took me a few seconds on how to use this, but once I figured it out, I was like, damn, this is pretty cool!<p>I wish there was a cli for this

Really great project, nice job author, hoping to use it as a starting point&#x2F;inspiration for some projects of my own.

I would love the ability to label and extract sections like in audacity! That’s the only thing missing from my use case

Now slap cloud storage, collaborative editing&#x2F;highlighting and paid accounts on it - this is impressive software!

This looks really cool, by the nature of my user name I must greedily request vintage sampler modes. :)

Impressive. Back in the day, SoundEdit16 was the thing. I hope they clone or skin it like that

Impressive - always amazed at the low-level stuff you can do in browsers nowadays. Nice job.

How do I delete a highlighted section? I feel like I am missing something simple.

Amazing stuff, thanks for sharing. Works great in my iPhone 6 browser

This us great! Kinda reminds me of cool edit pro (two point oooooh)

Awesome - kind of reminds me of the Renoise interface!

nice, was just looking for a free audio editor and could only find things that look like they&#x27;re from the 90&#x27;s (Audacity).<p>.wav export would be grand!

For a second I thought this is a WebAssembly app :)<p>Nice job!

Good job, like to see some good tutorials.

Really slick! Love this.

The UI is cool looking.

Nice spectrum analyzer!

thanks!

It&#x27;ll be very fun over the years, for whoever is tasked with it, to fix all of the bugs bugs common to audio editors like this.<p>My favourite one is how, depending on when, resizing the selection while playing with loop enabled can cause the cursor to escape the selection (!). That was the first one I checked for when I opened this up.