Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Make Dope Beats with ReactJS

formidable.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 47 posts

Re: Make Dope Beats with ReactJS

#11

Post by thekenwheeler »

coldtea wrote: post #10
Bahamut wrote: post #7

What advantage does this have over a regular DAW (other than being free)? Wouldn't most artists not be familiar with all of the concepts inherent with using JSX, and find it easier using a more traditional DAW? (FL Studio, Cubase, Reason, Logic, etc.) I get that this is a for fun project it seems, just seems a little low on the practical scale for an artist.

> What advantage does this have over a regular DAW (other than being free)? Absolutely nothing, and wasn't meant to at all. The purpose of this is is not to be practical, it's to make some noise with React.

Yeah, its severely limited compared to a DAW in almost every way. But its super fun to mess around with, and if you like React and the Web Audio API then its a cool example integration as well. My vision long term is that this will serve as a set of primitives that can be composed into instrument presets and have UI hooks so you can build something like a step sequencer UI or a drum machine.

Re: Make Dope Beats with ReactJS

#14

Post by joshontheweb »

React is actually really ideal for web audio components. The web audio api is quite easy to use for the most part. The hard part tends to be building usable ui on top of it. I've tried in the past to bundle up modular audio components in a way that they can be used in a package manager. It is hard to do well since you also need css and html to go along with the js. With react, all that stuff is already together in one modular piece that is easy to install in your audio chain.

I've worked on building some audio stuff before using backbone. I might restart with React. In the very least, I will try and implement the redux pattern.

My pet project: http://robotaudio.com/

more full featured synthesizer: https://github.com/joshontheweb/synth

Edit: Looks like the layout is bonkered for some reason. It normally looks better :D

Re: Make Dope Beats with ReactJS

#16

Post by imaginology »

I'm interested in this and I have bookmarked it to try out some time.

Maybe in the not-too-distant future the days of standalone audio software will be gone and everything will be run in a web browser. This would solve all the piracy problems, no need to update ever, and no compatibility issues.

I never tried the hardware MPCs, but I recently splashed out on an MPC Touch and I'm having a great time with it.

Re: Make Dope Beats with ReactJS

#17

Post by mst »

thekenwheeler wrote: post #11
coldtea wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What advantage does this have over a regular DAW (other than being free)? Absolutely nothing, and wasn't meant to at all. The purpose of this is is not to be practical, it's to make some noise with React.

Yeah, its severely limited compared to a DAW in almost every way. But its super fun to mess around with, and if you like React and the Web Audio API then its a cool example integration as well. My vision long term is that this will serve as a set of primitives that can be composed into instrument presets and have UI hooks so you can build something like a step sequencer UI or a drum machine.

Have you ever played Rez on the Dreamcast? I kept wondering if you could do procedurally generated music from monitoring inputs so that you could listen to your production system.

I mention this only because I've flailed and failed to even figure out where to start to do such a thing a few times, and what you're doing looks like sufficient fun that I'm actually tempted to try again. No promises I ever will or that I'll remember to tell you if I do, mind ;)

Or, tl;dr: "I don't care if it's powerful, it actually looks like fun and that's awesome".

Post reply on HN