Show HN: I'm building a browser-based DAW

There have been a couple attempts at this stuff in the past years. Every time people get a bit closer. So far timing issues and performance of compute intense operations have been the killer. Good luck!

I know this is a hobby project, but who is the target user for something like this? What&#x27;s the benefit of doing this in a browser?<p>Desktop DAW&#x27;s have many benefits:<p><pre><code> - ASIO drivers for low latency - Better CPU utilization - Multi-channel output - VST plugins (essential for most composers) - Good MIDI support</code></pre>

DAW: digital audio workstation - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Digital_audio_workstation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Digital_audio_workstation</a>

That&#x27;s interesting, but how are you going to deal with unpredictability of JS timers and with GC pauses?

Sadly the performance limitations of doing serious work in the browser seem to be holding back web-based DAWs.<p>I&#x27;d love to see a set of bindings come out that allow us to build web DAWs with the WebAudio API, but utilize native C&#x2F;C++ when run locally via e.g. Electron

ps - SOURCE CODE: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;shiehn&#x2F;SignalsAndSorcery" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;shiehn&#x2F;SignalsAndSorcery</a>

Interesting looking tool. I&#x27;m probably not the target audience, but could see how it could be useful. Here&#x27;s my take on what I saw:<p>The fonts make everything really hard to read. (Full disclosure, I&#x27;m old and my eyes suck, but I was wearing glasses while trying it out.) Personally, they also remind me of old Mac 128k adventure games. (Which I guess makes sense given the name, but isn&#x27;t what I want when working with a tool.)<p>I ran it in Orion (WebKit-based, similar to Safari) and couldn&#x27;t get more than one segment of music to play at a time.<p>Pressing the large play button at the bottom left did nothing, as did pressing the &quot;Render&quot; button.<p>The switches in the top row only look like switches once you mouse over them (at least in Orion). Otherwise they look like a small off-center circle and had me scratching my head. Some additional contrast in the background color of the switch might help.<p>I hope that helps!

I am working on something similar. But it&#x27;s just collection of instruments with limited recording capability.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;severak.github.io&#x2F;cyber-music-studio&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;severak.github.io&#x2F;cyber-music-studio&#x2F;</a>

Neato, I did something similar at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danielx.net&#x2F;composer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danielx.net&#x2F;composer&#x2F;</a><p>Web audio has come a long way. MIDI and SoundFont support was an adventure. Good luck!

It&#x27;s pretty slow to open a page. Saw this in the console, (index):62 cdn.tailwindcss.com should not be used in production. To use Tailwind CSS in production, install it as a PostCSS plugin or use the Tailwind CLI:

There&#x27;s an issue with the clip looping, it doesn&#x27;t repeat seamlessly at the start of a new bar. The DAW BPM and the clip&#x27;s BPM is matching.<p>I&#x27;m using the latest Chrome on OSX.

As someone who uses very minimal freeware DAWs (literally, LMMS and Audacity- I am now a big fan of FL Studio Mobile with the Samsung S Pen as well), I would probably use this a lot!<p>Have you considered a sample market? I&#x27;d love to be able to sell loops that I can&#x27;t really find much of a use for, or drum samples that I made myself but don&#x27;t need.

How come Paul Davis didn&#x27;t react yet ? ;-)

I mean I guess it depends on what it does, if it’s like a sequencer that’s fine. If it’s a live recording, live performance with synth plugins and filters and such yeah… I’m highly skeptical.

ps - all the samples&#x2F;loops are royalty free. I created REAPER daw scripts in LUA to quickly create beats&#x2F;loops which are machine annotated and then upload directly to the backend.

Take soundtrap.com and make it more like Fruiti Loops (android apk)

We started writing a web-based DAW prototype that relies on the Webaudio Modules version 2.0 (a standard for plugins&#x2F;hosts on the Web, that can be developed using a large variety of languages&#x2F;approaches). For the moment, the DAW has very limited features but 1) Each track is written as an AudioWorklet, and sample accurate processing is being done for playing each track. That means, that from the processor part of each track player, we can schedule events (automation, midi, etc) to plugins. We can also loop and edit the audio track with a sample accuracy (this is not done yet, but everything is ready for that. We will add this soon). 2) Each track is associated with a plugin chain. Plugins are WAM plugins (webaudiomodules), and can be automated. 3) There are quite a lot of plugins already available in the WAM format, most effects, instruments. The WAM distribution comes with a set of example plugins + the FAUST IDE can generate WAM2 plugins in seconds. All running DSP in WASM. We (WAM designers, implementers and maintainers) can be reached on a slack channel (#webaudiomodules, subchannel of the #webaudio channel. Get incitation here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web-audio-slackin.herokuapp.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web-audio-slackin.herokuapp.com&#x2F;</a><p>The WebAudioModules distro is 4 GitHub repos, it is also available as npm modules. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;webaudiomodules" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;webaudiomodules</a>, start by building the wam-example one and run the examples). You can find some presentations on youtube (such as: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8G3we8dikq8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8G3we8dikq8</a>).<p>DAW prototype (should be included soon in the wam-example repo): Picture : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.ibb.co&#x2F;mBdNGqk&#x2F;WAM2-DAW.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.ibb.co&#x2F;mBdNGqk&#x2F;WAM2-DAW.jpg</a> online version: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wam-openstudio.vidalmazuy.fr&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wam-openstudio.vidalmazuy.fr&#x2F;</a>, current repo (work in progress, as I said, this work is active and we do plan to add all missing functionnalities the upcoming months) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;TER-M1&#x2F;wam-openstudio" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;TER-M1&#x2F;wam-openstudio</a><p>There are also professional, commercial DAWs, not open source ones, such as <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ampedstudio.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ampedstudio.com&#x2F;</a> that is also capable of loading WAM plugins, and is developed using the same approach as our DAW proto (host as AW), bandlab.com or soundtrap.com.<p>Michel

I see no use in this incarnation.. I expected a DAW, and most of all something that&#x27;s multi-user&#x2F;collaborative.<p>But it&#x27;s probably fun to work on

Now with the clap plugin format and wasm its possible to have open audio and processesing plugins that could be used in the browser.

Nice. While I still favor native clients over web apps, stuff like this will make music production much more accessible.

Using Vivaldi, a chrome based browser, and this doesn&#x27;t seem to load&#x2F;work. What&#x27;s up with that?

Will it achieve latency on par with ASIO, in the ballpark of single-digit milliseconds?

The website&#x27;s design reminds me of Windows Vista in a very positive way.

but, why?

Do any of these browser projects support existing plug-ins?<p>A lot of people making music have spent $$$ on plugins, and just on the sheer R&amp;D they&#x27;ve received, are going to sound considerably better than anything someone who is focused on writing a DAW can make.<p>Plus, from my own experience, I have 20+ years working with FLStudio and know the program inside and out. Abandoning that plus my investments in VSTs is simply a no-go.<p>So, good luck, but you&#x27;ve got some significant barriers to overcome.

Why? If I want a DAW, that has extremely fair licensing conditions, a huge, passionate community, fast and steady, continious development, is highly compatible with the music recording environment and available on all three major platforms, I simply go for &quot;Reaper&quot;.