Have been following this library for years. Love it. Favourite projects were some personal desktop apps I did with it in Electron to mangle samples in cool ways for my own music projects.
Tone.js – A framework for making interactive music in the browser
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Re: Tone.js – A framework for making interactive music in the browser
#12The examples were a lot of fun to play with. Nice work.
I was thinking earlier today of creating an F1 engine note simulator. I would want to play with the number of cylinders, v angle, crank offset (v8 normal crank/180 crank) and maybe some kind of exhaust system variables (tuned length, crossover pipe), and of course RPM. I don't know where to start, could you point me at the type of programming I would want to look at to figure out how to do this?
Here is an f1 car engine playing God Save the Queen [1], sounds atrocious, but still cool.
Re: Tone.js – A framework for making interactive music in the browser
#13One interesting thing to me about Tone.js has always been that their “Transport” API is a more reliable interval/timer tool than any of the native JS APIs or even libraries/polyfills designed around more accurate interval timing. I’d almost be surprised if I wasn’t wrong about this but I searched and couldn’t find anything quite comparable.
It has sample-level precision, just like the Web Audio API provided by the browser (which is what's used under the hood). It's pretty much independent of non-audio time APIs.
Interesting, makes sense. I wonder — is setInterval not as precise because it doesn’t really need to be (and thus it’d be a waste of complexity to be that precise)?
Re: Tone.js – A framework for making interactive music in the browser
#14This is a really awesome framework. Working on a generative chord progression project right now using it (Also my first foray into typescript -- looks like the type definitions for Tone.js are a bit out of date).
Re: Tone.js – A framework for making interactive music in the browser
#15TONE.JS is really fun. My hobby project uses RNNs to generate MIDI parts and play them back through TONE.js : http://treblemaker.ai
Re: Tone.js – A framework for making interactive music in the browser
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has sample-level precision, just like the Web Audio API provided by the browser (which is what's used under the hood). It's pretty much independent of non-audio time APIs.
Interesting, makes sense. I wonder — is setInterval not as precise because it doesn’t really need to be (and thus it’d be a waste of complexity to be that precise)?
It's not that Tone is more precise than setInterval, it's that the web audio APIs underneath are precisely scheduled, and Tone provides an interface to them.
That is, if you set up a Tone transport to fire events every 100ms, it's not like your event handler gets called precisely 100ms later. Rather, it gets called early - say 85ms later - with a parameter saying "hey that event you wanted is precisely 14.7803ms away". Then you can call an API saying "okay, play a tone 14.7803ms from now", and Tone passes that along to web audio, and the end result is that your note plays with sample-level precision.
But if you used Tone's transport to do something other than calling web audio APIs it wouldn't be any more precise than setInterval. (IIRC Tone actually uses setInterval to fire its events.)
Re: Tone.js – A framework for making interactive music in the browser
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting, makes sense. I wonder — is setInterval not as precise because it doesn’t really need to be (and thus it’d be a waste of complexity to be that precise)?
It's not that Tone is more precise than setInterval, it's that the web audio APIs underneath are precisely scheduled, and Tone provides an interface to them. That is, if you set up a Tone transport to fire events every 100ms, it's not like your event handler gets called precisely 100ms later. Rather, it gets called early - say 85ms later - with a parameter saying "hey that event you wanted is precisely 14.7803ms away…
https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/audio/scheduling/ is a deeper dive into how it works.
Re: Tone.js – A framework for making interactive music in the browser
#18I used Tone.js to create my music theory website https://www.lightnote.co/ Using recordings from my guitar (of each and every note) I was able to build an interactive fretboard that could play guitar tabs/chords. Also the Transport API made it simple to build a drum looping machine very quickly. Ableton has built something similar, also using Tone.js: https://learningmusic.ableton.com/make-beats/make-beats.html Perfo…
Just tried https://www.lightnote.co/ . Thank you for making it, I really love it.
+1 This is a Fabulous site. I've been playing guitar and keyboards for over 30 years, and I just learned so many new things about music theory from your site. Great work, and I shall spread this around to anyone I know who is learning music theory. Love your work!
Re: Tone.js – A framework for making interactive music in the browser
#19I've really enjoyed working with Tone.js! Many of Songcraft's (https://songcraft.io) audio features are powered by Tone.js. It's been a great way to manage loops, samples, etc. It makes it quite easy to do things like playing notes or chords in time with a looping metronome. Generally really nice for managing a global audio track with volume, mute, etc as well.
Re: Tone.js – A framework for making interactive music in the browser
#20I’ve compaired this with Howler.js and couldn’t easily see the observable trade-offs between these two. I guess I’d have to actually implement something with both of them to find out. Howler has a neat concept of audio sprites and the library seems more popular for some reason.