[HN Gopher] Show HN: I'm building a browser-based DAW
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: I'm building a browser-based DAW
Author : stevehiehn
Score : 153 points
Date : 2022-07-20 13:15 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (signalsandsorcery.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (signalsandsorcery.org)
| jbverschoor wrote:
| I see no use in this incarnation.. I expected a DAW, and most of
| all something that's multi-user/collaborative.
|
| But it's probably fun to work on
| stevehiehn wrote:
| ps - all the samples/loops are royalty free. I created REAPER daw
| scripts in LUA to quickly create beats/loops which are machine
| annotated and then upload directly to the backend.
| 12ian34 wrote:
| but, why?
| guggle wrote:
| How come Paul Davis didn't react yet ? ;-)
| pyrossh wrote:
| It'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:
| stevehiehn wrote:
| Honestly still trying to figure out what I'm even building, but
| I agree, the load time is pretty bad. Also I'm using the
| smallest instance of Postgress Google Cloud Run offers and I've
| never stress-tested it before :)
| Yahivin wrote:
| Neato, I did something similar at https://danielx.net/composer/
|
| Web audio has come a long way. MIDI and SoundFont support was an
| adventure. Good luck!
| stevehiehn wrote:
| This reply makes me happy. This app is great :)
| glial wrote:
| So awesome! It makes me nostalgic for Mario Paint:
|
| https://youtu.be/T3MWzEgtzDU?t=442
| redsummer wrote:
| zmix wrote:
| 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 "Reaper".
| stevehiehn wrote:
| I think the most valuable feedback I'm taking away today is to
| immediately stop using the term DAW. I'm building a loop
| arranger that exports a project to a DAW. REAPER is what I use
| to create samples. It's the only DAW I know of that allows
| scripting powerful enough to create a project, add midi, bounce
| the tracks, annotate them and upload to my server. I was hoping
| the BitWig api would allow me to do all these things but it
| doesn't. At least not yet?
| [deleted]
| capableweb wrote:
| adamnemecek wrote:
| capableweb wrote:
| Haha fuck, you're joking right? Gotta say, your humor in that
| case is right up my alley.
|
| For the backstory, see a previous comment of mine:
|
| > So far there are 54 mentions of ngrid.io, all by the same
| user (adamnemecek) [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&pag
| e=0&prefix=false&qu...] and all for highly unrelated topics.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31282746
|
| > And finally, anyone who have been reading comments on
| music-related submissions here on HN for the last 4 years
| (yeah, really! Take a look at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRan
| ge=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... and go to the last page!)
| have seen ngrid being mentioned by adamnemecek on basically
| every single music-related submission.
|
| > There is a time and place for posting your own projects.
| Doing it on every submission that is slightly related to your
| projects theme is not that.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302876
|
| In short: you're constantly spamming your project on HN.
| People like me get tired of spammers. I'm not doubting you're
| actively working on the project, probably all spammers who
| spam their project is also working on their project, but that
| doesn't make it less spammy.
|
| Getting your project ready for public consumption takes time,
| no one is "upset" about that something takes longer than
| expected. What does upset people, is the constant spam. So if
| you instead just wait until it's ready and then do (one) Show
| HN, you'd end up with less upset people.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| You generally want to have an email list of people to
| contact when you launch.
| capableweb wrote:
| Then do that instead of constantly spamming HN?
|
| Maybe @dang / moderators needs to step in a do something
| about this, because it doesn't seem like you actually
| understand what spam is/isn't.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| It seems like today, you did it for me.
| capableweb wrote:
| Well, does this mean you'll wait until you launch, then
| do one "Show HN" and in the meantime stop spamming all
| music-related threads? If not, whatever I do is futile
| adamnemecek wrote:
| I'm close to launch so yes I can not spam until then.
| pvg wrote:
| _For the backstory_
|
| This has nothing to do with the posted Show HN and whatever
| this other user has done, bringing them up in an unrelated
| thread and hounding them is way worse than any kind of
| spamming.
| p1esk wrote:
| I guess it's not clear why you're posting these comments if
| it's not ready. Just post "Show HN" when it is.
| detaro wrote:
| You don't improve signal-noise ratio by adding to the noise, so
| please don't. Comments like this improve nothing.
| capableweb wrote:
| Yeah, you're right, A bit strong reaction from me maybe, I'm
| sorry for that. I guess I just gotten really frustrated with
| the spamming and trying to see some humor in that, and trying
| to share the humor. But you're absolutely right, I shouldn't
| have written that comment.
| detaro wrote:
| yeah, I get the frustration.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| There's an issue with the clip looping, it doesn't repeat
| seamlessly at the start of a new bar. The DAW BPM and the clip's
| BPM is matching.
|
| I'm using the latest Chrome on OSX.
| stevehiehn wrote:
| Thanks for pointing that out. It's still very much a WIP. I'll
| fix that!
| klntsky wrote:
| That's interesting, but how are you going to deal with
| unpredictability of JS timers and with GC pauses?
| stevehiehn wrote:
| It's not real-time. The backend is fed heavily annotated loops.
| It merges all the audio buffers before playback. I regret using
| the term DAW. It's a bit disingenuous. It's really a loop
| preview/arranger for people looking for royalty free loops.
| (Not unlike Splice) HOWEVER - I am experimenting with an
| arpegiator and seeing where that goes.
| breckinloggins wrote:
| The web audio platform has approaches that purport to work
| around this [0]. We'll see how that pans out (no pun intended).
|
| [0] For example: https://web.dev/audio-scheduling/
| margoguryan wrote:
| 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!
|
| Have you considered a sample market? I'd love to be able to sell
| loops that I can't really find much of a use for, or drum samples
| that I made myself but don't need.
| stevehiehn wrote:
| ya, so that was the original Idea for this project (and still
| is-ish): A user generated sample platform. Then I decided I
| need a slick way for folks to preview the samples and am now
| trending towards building a composition tool.
|
| Also feel free to download and use the samples. They are 100%
| royalty free.
| superb-owl wrote:
| Sadly the performance limitations of doing serious work in the
| browser seem to be holding back web-based DAWs.
|
| I'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/C++ when run
| locally via e.g. Electron
| stevehiehn wrote:
| Agreed, I'm trying to work the angle where you quickly arrange
| loops and midi then download a bundle to import into your
| favorite desktop DAW.
| rutierut wrote:
| WASM and WebGPU do help a lot. WebAudio is still severely
| limited though.
| antidnan wrote:
| Are there any projects using WASM for DAWs?
| p0nce wrote:
| https://www.webaudiomodules.org/
| stevehiehn wrote:
| This is very interesting thanks!
| jcelerier wrote:
| It's still alpha but https://ossia.io/score-web is the
| whole https://ossia.io (C++ / Qt) compiled to WASM. I
| haven't implemented file import at all yet though and there
| are enough UI bugs and latency / performance is too poor to
| make this nothing more than a fun but useless experiment...
| but it'll come as soon as I have some time to spend on it
| :-)
| capableweb wrote:
| Not sure how much WASM would help, except for very
| complicated effects and/or sound generators. It would
| introduce latency as JS<>WASM still needs to communicate
| since you can't play audio directly from WASM.
|
| The problem with DAWs in browsers is more around latency
| and precise timing, which browsers don't exactly excel at
| compared to desktop applications.
| stevehiehn wrote:
| ps - SOURCE CODE: https://github.com/shiehn/SignalsAndSorcery
| pmayrgundter wrote:
| Aha! This is the main feature for me.. not necessarily that I'm
| going to start hacking, but it signals the right mental
| model... which is, friends jamming online, minimal to no-
| strings attached.
|
| Must haves: - Compose a draft and share with
| friends, so that they can contribute - No
| install/login required.. just too much of a drag to keep track
| of when we're evaluating new things all the time.
|
| _All the music features are less important_
|
| backstory is my band broke up after we all moved around the
| country and too far for live jams due to latency. Since, we've
| been after an async composer just to screw around again.
| rutierut wrote:
| 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!
| and0 wrote:
| I've always heard the same thing. I have some questions, if
| anyone has answers.
|
| 1.) Is WebAssembly better about timing + buffers?
|
| 2.) Is JS have a WebGL-esque lower-level interface with audio
| hardware planned?
|
| 3.) I believe Electron grants more local permissions. I know
| Electron has some modernization hurdles (ESM still I think) but
| wonder if it's any better or the Chromium process within it has
| higher affinity than a proper browser. Not quite "web-based"
| but maybe a better option as your project gets more complex.
|
| 4.) Is it possible to have a buffer that "renders" separate
| from any loops themselves? If you can't time a drumtrack in
| real-time accurately enough or "play" an instrument you could
| certainly have it render N millisecond ahead.
| stevehiehn wrote:
| I agree. Although I'm using the term DAW it's really a loop
| arranger pulling from the server.
| 0x20cowboy wrote:
| I've tried to build a similar thing several times over the
| years - once in flash and once in JS.
|
| Timing is the hardest - especially if you're going to try to
| let people record on the fly against the running track. Have
| two or more play at the same time... rough.
|
| And I suggest you checkout
| https://www2022.thewebconf.org/PaperFiles/40.pdf there is an
| implementation called wam out there that lets you use VSTs in
| JS. It works pretty well.
|
| Good luck! I'll be one of the first to sign up.
| and0 wrote:
| Oh, that's very cool. Any ability to run the server as a
| local service?
|
| I know people who mix+master and sending huge project files
| and also have to convert between DAW formats even. Having a
| common web DAW that can render on a server could be a very
| powerful ecosystem.
| CSSer wrote:
| Sounds like a job for web workers. Do you have any examples?
| I'd love to check them out. I've seen some sequencers but never
| a full-blown DAW attempt. I've been toying with a couple
| browser-based, realtime audio ML ideas lately (mostly porting
| some models to Tensorflow.js), so my interest is piqued.
|
| As far as libraries go for analysis, the only solid option I've
| found so far is Meyda[0]. I was drawn to it mostly because it
| closely maps to librosa[1], and it seems fairly mature. Does
| anyone have any others that may come in handy for this kind of
| work? This is just free-time tinkering for me. I'm completely
| new to the space.
|
| [0]: https://meyda.js.org/ [1]: https://librosa.org/
| vanillaicesquad wrote:
| soundtrap.com is the answer, mostly.
| playworker wrote:
| Audiotool? I've never used it but it looks relevant:
| https://www.audiotool.com/
| drcongo wrote:
| Audiotool is surprisingly capable.
| vanillaicesquad wrote:
| Take soundtrap.com and make it more like Fruiti Loops (android
| apk)
| ccbccccbbcccbb wrote:
| Will it achieve latency on par with ASIO, in the ballpark of
| single-digit milliseconds?
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Do any of these browser projects support existing plug-ins?
|
| A lot of people making music have spent $$$ on plugins, and just
| on the sheer R&D they've received, are going to sound
| considerably better than anything someone who is focused on
| writing a DAW can make.
|
| 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.
|
| So, good luck, but you've got some significant barriers to
| overcome.
| ksm1717 wrote:
| Yea what an idiot to not make this free proof of concept of a
| browser daw targeted at 20+ years power users
| lostgame wrote:
| tomc1985 made an extremely valid point here, as any serious
| DAW user would agree - they did not imply the creator was an
| idiot, but that _any_ DAW without plug-in support is, at best
| - a toy, and I will personally add that the concept of using
| a browser to record audio when latency and playback quality
| is already an issue with fully OS-native DAW's.
|
| Other than some side project just for fun, I absolutely see
| no practical use, application, or function the app can
| provide that Ardour (which is already open-source and free if
| you compile it) isn't going to do infinitely better.
|
| The author isn't an idiot, quite the opposite, it takes a lot
| of effort to write even a simple DAW.
|
| But the product makes no sense. The target platform is
| totally in opposition to the needs the tool requires to
| fulfill its purpose.
|
| It's like those people who run DOOM on their smart fridge.
| The creator isn't an idiot, it's just a waste of time outside
| of saying 'I did this' and nobody is ever actually going to
| choose to seriously play the game with that way.
|
| There's no need to be snarky like you're being, it's possible
| to make points without coming off like an asshole.
| Optimal_Persona wrote:
| Thanks, you basically wrote what I was going to. In audio-
| production-land, the term DAW is generally understood to
| mean "real-time (single-digit ms latency) capable audio
| plugin host and audio/MIDI sequencer". Anything not
| checking all those boxes is interesting, but likely won't
| be "able to(n)" get a whole lot of "tracktion" from "avid"
| users. ;-D
|
| I also need to note that users of free/cheap audio software
| can be some of the brattiest, most entitled and actively
| hostile users I've seen anywhere, based in my 20+ years on
| KVR, GearSpace, and other forums. Every dev in the space
| needs to have a thick skin and be ready for the "it would
| be great if only it..." to start rolling in.
|
| Great to see people pushing the "envelope" of browser-based
| tech!
| tomc1985 wrote:
| > Yea what an idiot
|
| You are saying this, not me.
| zero_iq wrote:
| tbf, it's pretty clear who he's calling an idiot, and it's
| not OP.
| ksm1717 wrote:
| Yea I'm mocking you because if you couldn't tell how
| annoying your obvious "constructive" criticism was going to
| sound, you've got some significant barriers to overcome
| cjaybo wrote:
| If you know anything about music production, you'd know
| it's a very valid critique. Not sure why you took it so
| personally, though.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| It's also such an obvious question though, isn't it? You
| think that the developer pouring so much of their free
| time into a browser-based DAW wouldn't have considered
| the idea of supporting plug-ins at all?
|
| People far too often approach projects like this with
| "this app is only useful for me if it does x..." and I
| think that framing is poor when someone is just
| exercising their passion on a project. I'd personally
| respond with "great, go build your own that supports your
| plug-ins. Have fun."
| tomc1985 wrote:
| A lot of people have dropped their side-project in-
| browser "DAW" projects on HN, several of them did seem
| like they wanted to be taken seriously
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| The difference is that you're coming across as needlessly
| aggressive and insulting... which is fine for Reddit but
| not so appropriate on hacker news.
|
| Both they and I would both love to know if the developer
| behind this DAW has given any thought to how they might
| integrate with existing plug-ins such as VSTs, not an
| easy feat.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Not sure why you are being so hostile with this user,
| especially given his question/concern is valid (source:
| media production for over a decade).
|
| Plug-ins are often the secret sauce for our workflows and
| styles, and prosumers/hobbyists dip into them as well. If
| your browser based DAW doesn't have, say, Izotope RX
| support, then that's a non-starter for a ton of people
| (especially podcasters). I'm not going to round trip
| between software on my computer and a browser based
| software, that's for sure. I don't have time for that
| nonsense.
|
| Regardless of your opinion or how you feel about the
| above, your tone is needlessly hostile and unproductive.
| butwhywhyoh wrote:
| Would you give this same critique to someone who was building a
| go-kart in their backyard for fun?
|
| "Car companies like Honda and Ford have been around for
| decades, and those vehicles are going to drive considerably
| better than anything someone working in their backyard could
| make.
|
| Plus, from my own experience, I've been driving these cars for
| the past 20 years, and abandoning that experience in how they
| feel and handle is a no-go.
|
| So good luck, but you've got significant barriers to overcome"
| [deleted]
| tomc1985 wrote:
| tobr wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
|
| "Show HN is for something you've made that other people can
| play with". It doesn't have to be a product, and I can't
| see anything in the guidelines that precludes sharing "toy
| projects". On the contrary, a "Show HN needn't be
| complicated or look slick."
|
| It's up to the community to use upvotes to determine what's
| interesting to the audience, not individual self-censorship
| of what might offend those "grognards".
| all2 wrote:
| RobbieGM wrote:
| > "Do it in a browser" is not interesting enough.
|
| I disagree. DAWs are huge pieces of software to begin with
| and doing high-performance audio work in the browser would
| be very impressive.
| [deleted]
| crubier wrote:
| Let's make WASM VST plugins!
| mxmilkiib wrote:
| The DPF framework is moving towards WASM build targets;
|
| https://cardinal.kx.studio - web version of the VCV Rack
| wrapper Cardinal
|
| https://github.com/DISTRHO/Cardinal/issues/287
| tomc1985 wrote:
| My other thing is... why does something like this need to run
| in a browser? What's wrong with desktop apps?
|
| I have FLStudio mobile and some other mobile DAW on my iphone
| and ipad. And to be honest, I _never_ use them, other than as
| a tapping BPM counter. Do people actually feel productive
| tapping this stuff in on an iPad?
| [deleted]
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > What's wrong with desktop apps?
|
| Shoddy support for platforms other than Windows, not to
| mention VSTs going out of support by the developers and
| then unusable when something changes (e.g. Apple dropping
| support for 32-bit x86 years ago).
|
| WASM is at least a common denominator supported
| everywhere... basically Java just better.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| Ummm ... Audacity is fully cross-platform (Windows,
| macOS, GNU/Linux and other operating systems) and open
| source [0]. ProTools (the elephant in the room) was
| originally developed (and still) on the Mac [1]
|
| [0] https://www.audacityteam.org/
|
| [1] https://www.avid.com/pro-tools
| cheschire wrote:
| Audacity isn't available on iOS or iPadOS. This browser
| tool, however, is.
| Arcanum-XIII wrote:
| Except nearly all of them support both main desktop
| platform, so not exactly a valid critique. True Linux is
| often forgotten. But is there a real market there? And to
| my knowledge, Linux low level audio performance is quite
| bad, which doesn't help.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Bitwig's pretty good as a cross-platform DAW, from what I
| hear.
|
| There's entire ecosystems of plugins out there. Yes they
| can be reimplemented but if the authors use the same
| quick algorithms as everyone else it's going to sound
| plastic-y and dull. IMO plugin dev is one of those things
| where every hour spent makes a cumulative difference in
| output quality.
|
| WASM may be great, but unless they can run as their own
| binary in their own windows you're going to have browser
| overhead for each window, nevermind those of us that
| spread our DAWs out across multiple screens.
| npigrounet wrote:
| BizarroLand wrote:
| The only thing I can think of would be that it would be
| great if you could easily record with people on the same
| interface over the internet. Maybe not live jamming or
| anything, since the delay would be murderous at best, but
| that it would be great to be able to have your drummer lay
| down a track at 3am and your guitarist lay down a rhythm to
| it at 7 and wake up and do vocals when you're ready instead
| of having to schedule time to all meet together.
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| What's wrong with browser apps?
| fwsgonzo wrote:
| Audio is real-time and performance is everything.
| Freezing tracks should take the least amount of time
| possible and no skipping should occur unless you are
| using the most complex modular VST out there. With WASM
| being like 1/3 of native and having extremely limited
| SIMD support I would probably expect it to not work at
| all for serious work.
|
| Quite frankly, even native performance is often not
| enough.
|
| That said, I can see it being relevant for learning
| audio, synthesis and how signal processing works. And of
| course, just for fun!
|
| Source: Worked with DAWs for a decade. Also currently
| writing a paper on the role of native performance.
| awongh wrote:
| I've played around with ableton before- im wondering what
| are the high-level aspects of a DAW that take up that
| compute? Off the top of my head if you have like 10
| channels of synths, what in there is super intensive?
| What does freezing tracks mean and why is it so
| expensive?
| duped wrote:
| It's not the high level aspects, but the low level ones.
|
| Audio DSP is doing a lot of math. CPUs are good at it,
| sure, but modern synths and effects are legitimately
| pushing up against how much math a CPU core can evaluate
| in the few milliseconds you have to render (in the worst
| case, low latency realtime rendering time is actually
| dominated not by how much DSP you can do, but how long it
| takes to move audio from userland to kernel and out to
| the hardware and back).
|
| Some of the DSP algorithms are really hard to optimize
| with SIMD, in fact most of the common audio DSP
| operations can't be trivially converted to SIMD forms
| (and when they are, they aren't N times faster for N more
| lanes). Filters are especially tricky because converting
| the math from one form to another changes the topology of
| the signal flow, which is only equivalent in the steady-
| state of non-linear and time-invariant filters. DAWs are
| using non-linear time variant filters that are being
| modulated in realtime, so your super fast SIMD optimized
| biquads might not sound as good as the converted SVF that
| can't be trivially optimized (there are tricks, but it's
| a game of tradeoffs).
|
| And there's the other aspect of the scene that there's
| just a lot of bad or naive code out there. There is a lot
| of know-how floating around, but a lot of tools are
| designed by folks without it to begin with. That's a good
| thing because it makes a lot of interesting and cool
| tools, but it also means that institutional knowledge is
| kind of locked away. It doesn't help that some of the
| largest examples for newcomers (JUCE's DSP module,
| RAFX/Aspik with the accompanying text), as well as
| classic (and new!) textbooks teach people to do things in
| the least performant way possible, and those algorithms
| make it into production.
| logarhythmic wrote:
| Thanks for the informative comment. Are there resources
| you would recommend for learning more about performant
| algorithms? At the moment I'm just messing around with
| JUCE
| tomc1985 wrote:
| > you have like 10 channels of synths, what in there is
| super intensive
|
| The synth itself. Samplers, hardware emulations, and
| effects can eat a lot of memory and CPU, to say nothing
| of a monster 100+ voice synth patch (very easy to achieve
| with unison, used in supersaw-type sounds)
|
| > What does freezing tracks mean and why is it so
| expensive?
|
| Freezing tracks means recording the output of that track
| to a WAV and using that output as a stand-in for the real
| thing. Freezing tracks isn't expensive, it's what you use
| when another plug-in is too expensive and you want to
| reduce your CPU load.
| vnorilo wrote:
| There's been some work on Web Audio Modules, including glue
| for prior native plugin frameworks like Juce.
|
| https://www.webaudiomodules.org/
| severak_cz wrote:
| I am working on something similar. But it's just collection of
| instruments with limited recording capability.
|
| https://severak.github.io/cyber-music-studio/
| thewebcount wrote:
| Interesting looking tool. I'm probably not the target audience,
| but could see how it could be useful. Here's my take on what I
| saw:
|
| The fonts make everything really hard to read. (Full disclosure,
| I'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't what I want when working with a tool.)
|
| I ran it in Orion (WebKit-based, similar to Safari) and couldn't
| get more than one segment of music to play at a time.
|
| Pressing the large play button at the bottom left did nothing, as
| did pressing the "Render" button.
|
| 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.
|
| I hope that helps!
| stevehiehn wrote:
| Thanks! I wish I could afford a designer. I'm trying to do my
| best with TailwindCss ATM.
| stevehiehn wrote:
| Regarding browser compatibility: I want to see whats possible
| on chrome followed by mobile. I don't really know exactly how
| portable the WebAudioApi is tbh.
| drchopchop wrote:
| I know this is a hobby project, but who is the target user for
| something like this? What's the benefit of doing this in a
| browser?
|
| Desktop DAW's have many benefits: - ASIO drivers
| for low latency - Better CPU utilization - Multi-
| channel output - VST plugins (essential for most composers)
| - Good MIDI support
| EUROCARE wrote:
| Locked down school computer users
|
| Chromebook users
|
| On-the-go users
|
| Teachers where students have their own computers
|
| I bet there's more
| paulmd wrote:
| Yeah latency and timing seems like the killer, it's practically
| hard to imagine a worse possible environment for this.
|
| Especially, btw, with the Spectre/meltdown mitigations that
| coarsen the browser's clock resolution/etc.
| stevehiehn wrote:
| The platform is really about uploading strictly annotated loops
| and stems to the server and have them exposed via an API. The
| DAW thing your looking at is really just away to preview the
| content. So I'm trying to see how far I can push it.
| bee_rider wrote:
| That seems like a really cool idea, and I'd be curious to see
| how far it can go.
|
| I'm sure you aren't aiming your project at, like, totally
| upending the record publishing industry. But it would be cool
| if someday artists could upload snippets, mix them together,
| publish the result for sale on a site. And somehow have it
| sort out the contributors so that royalties can be trickled
| down elegantly so that, like, the internet-equivalent of a
| session artist gets a fair cut.
|
| Uh... not to set the bar too high or anything. Good luck!
| rzzzt wrote:
| Firefox' audio backend, cubeb supports Jack, CoreAudio and
| WASAPI output, so low latency and multi-channel playback is not
| completely out of reach.
| disintegore wrote:
| I realize this probably isn't what the OP was aiming for, but I
| think a web-based DAW would be wonderful for artists
| collaborating over the internet.
|
| I am currently recording an album with my band and we all have
| have monitoring equipment and recording interfaces at home
| (save for the drummer for obvious reasons) and currently we
| just bounce a Reaper project between each other so we can all
| add our respective tracks.
|
| It's far from ideal. We don't all run the same OS. We don't all
| use the same commercial plugins. Result is that nobody gets the
| same audio out of it and sometimes the project gets mangled (eg
| the Linux port can't load some resources because they point
| towards `C:\Users\JohnDoe\Album` or something). Also, the
| folders get _huge_ very fast.
|
| A web-native DAW would solve a lot of these problems, assuming
| realtime audio is possible. I know that, for instance, with
| Pipewire or JACK/PulseAudio, you could probably pull it off,
| but I have no idea how it would work on Windows' audio stack
| which appears to be made of pixie dust.
|
| I'm hoping the VST format dies a painful death, personally.
| It's a non-portable legacy solution and even in the best of
| cases it's a pain to work with.
| drchopchop wrote:
| Ableton does allow you to easily export sessions, and freeze
| tracks that have custom plugins. Their stock plugins are now
| good enough that they can rival commercial ones for many use
| cases (which is often good enough to the track to the final
| mixing stages).
|
| Definitely agree re: VST format - PC/Mac/Linux fragmentation
| is annoying, old plugins often can't even be loaded, and
| sharing presets is a pain.
| disintegore wrote:
| I just don't think an audio plugin should be able to bring
| down the entire host application due to bad memory
| management.
| _flux wrote:
| Bitwig actually has this figured out: all audio stuff is
| already its own separate separate process and you can
| even further isolate plugins to separate processes.
|
| Probably they key reason why they get to support X86
| plugins on M1.
| disintegore wrote:
| That's extremely interesting. When a plugin crashes, what
| happens to the rest of the signal chain?
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I don't think you can really squeeze out enough performance
| out of web browser for a full-fledged DAW.
|
| One of my complete song can push even my Intel i9 to its
| knees on desktop. You're talking about dozens of MIDI tracks,
| dozens of audio tracks, several plugins...that requires heavy
| duty performance.
| ajakate wrote:
| Agreed! Around the time the lockdown happened my band
| discovered bandlab.com, another online DAW. The
| lag/performance is a little slow to do serious recording
| (though you can get by by making an audio recording and
| manually shifting it a few ms in the interface), but it's a
| fantastic way to share songs/ideas back and forth. Often what
| some of us do is record tracks in our own local DAWS and
| upload the track wavs to bandlab. At the very least it allows
| us to:
|
| - mute tracks easily, change volume on parts
|
| - add tracks where we can upload alternate/extra parts
|
| - visualize the structural flow of a song
|
| - general cut/splice play around :)
|
| the company that makes bandlab also makes a desktop DAW
| called cakewalk. It seems to have a nice feature where you
| can sync it with bandlab, which would be killer. It's windows
| only so I've been unable to try it out though
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-20 23:01 UTC)