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Show HN: Wavepot – Digital audio workstation of the web

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Re: Show HN: Wavepot – Digital audio workstation of the web

#81

Post by saidajigumi »

fat0wl wrote: post #50
fat0wl wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yea want to try it but i'm stuck on max 5... max upgrades are more expensive than they're worth & now its splitting into multiple products (max4live,gen) so i'm kindof on an every other generation plan unfortunately. especially annoying when features you like get deprecated (pluggo, ms. pinky) though i understand gen & max4live both kinda serve as pluggo replacements. all in all its just hard for me to pull the trigg…

And I should point out that I personally feel kinda guilty... I met Miller Puckette and he was so enthusiastic about PureData and how much more the community could grow. I realize the biggest reason Max is thriving is because of marketing and now integration with Ableton. I feel like if something were done to prevent Pd from being wiped off the map we could have had an open source community by now rather than Cycling…

> I feel like if something were done to prevent Pd from being wiped off the map we could have had an open source community by now rather than Cycling 74.

But we got another repeat of the scenario: the OSS project was unable to muster decent UI while the commercial variant was able to both fund the staff and draw out the needs from its user community to make continual UI improvements. (Speaking specifically to the vast improvements over time culminating in Max 6.) If I sound a bit testy here, it's because I've seen too many promising OSS projects killed by this same problem: terrible user experience.

> I realize the biggest reason Max is thriving is because of marketing

I strenuously disagree. It's because PD absolutely failed to deliver a sane user experience, period. Sure, marketing is important, but Cycling '74's work is what makes Max at all relevant today. About all that PD ever had going for it versus Max was being open source.

As someone who used Max/FTS back on the ISPW[1], even that old UI was vastly better than PD's. I enthusiastically gave PD a go when it first came out, even going back from time to time to check in on it. Every time I found it nigh unusable due to huge UI issues. Especially for what amounts to a visual programming language, this is the death knell. For comparison, it's not like early ISPW Max didn't have its pain points.

Max users owe Miller Puckette a substantial debt for his contributions to this excellent visual signal/event programming environment, so it's unfortunate that PD was never able to pull it together.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISPW

Re: Show HN: Wavepot – Digital audio workstation of the web

#82

Post by notthetup »

chrisdevereux wrote: post #54
chrislo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware of the Web Audio API? It's an API designed especially to address those concerns, and achieves low latency and high performance where it is available (Chrome, Firefox and some versions of Safari currently). https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/audio/raw-file/tip/webaudio/specifica...

Yes, and it works by mostly avoiding realtime DSP in javascript. It provides a high-level API for wiring together prebuilt audio processing nodes. Much like using browser animation APIs vs programatic animation. My point is about the feasibility of JS signal processing, not the feasibility of using JS to glue together signal processors. The WebAudio API does provide a ScriptProcessorNode for JS processing, but it app…

"The WebAudio API does provide a ScriptProcessorNode for JS processing, but it appears to suffer from the problems I described."

Yup. That is being worked on by W3C and the WebAudio committee as we speak. WebWorker based JS processing is something being considered.

https://github.com/WebAudio/web-audio-api/issues/113

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-audio/2013OctDec/...

I am expecting this to be resolved in a few months. (hopefylly?)

If the threading issues are resolved, then real time audio rendering doesn't take that much processing power and can be easily done in JS.

Infact if there is nothing else contending for the EventLoop (like in this example of WavPot) the ScriptProcessorNode is able to meet the real-time guarantees pretty well, while still doing decent processing.

Also going forward, with Technologies like SIMD.js and asm.js more can be done within a single onprocess callback.

Re: Show HN: Wavepot – Digital audio workstation of the web

#84

Post by elwell »

jamesmoss wrote: post #30

A scene has sprung up around music based on algorithms, called Algorave http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorave Vice did an article on the subject a few months back which gives an overview of the scene (from a layman's view) http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/algorave-is-the-future-of-dan...

> it is quite contrary to normal raves due to the fact that the music can be very stop-and-start and the ingestion of MDMA, ketamine or other illicit drugs does not usually happen

- wikipedia

Re: Show HN: Wavepot – Digital audio workstation of the web

#85

Post by sossles »

What a great idea. I want to make synthesized sound effects for a game I'm making, and building them algorithmically in Javascript would be great. My alternatives have involved twiddling a zillion predefined knobs in a overwhelming UI, but as a developer this is far more appealing.

If only I could export the generated sound!

Re: Show HN: Wavepot – Digital audio workstation of the web

#86

Post by stagas »

sossles wrote: post #85

What a great idea. I want to make synthesized sound effects for a game I'm making, and building them algorithmically in Javascript would be great. My alternatives have involved twiddling a zillion predefined knobs in a overwhelming UI, but as a developer this is far more appealing. If only I could export the generated sound!

Uncompressed code export with convenience methods like .play() is planned for milestone I. This exact use-case is what I had in mind.

Re: Show HN: Wavepot – Digital audio workstation of the web

#89

Post by leeoniya »

nnnnni wrote: post #7
JonnieCache wrote: post #2

This isn't really a DAW. For those unfamiliar, a DAW is a fully-featured music creation environment including sound design, composition, recording, arrangement and mixing in one interface. Examples include logic, cubase and ableton. While I suppose this does allow for all of those things, as much as any programming language with access to an audio API does, this would be better described as a web-based DSP livecoding…

Yeah, it's definitely cool for what it is -- but it is NOT a DAW. I would call it the audio equivalent of OpenSCAD.

just saw this reply, also thought same thing!

http://www.openscad.org/

Re: Show HN: Wavepot – Digital audio workstation of the web

#90

Post by nitrogen »

stagas wrote: post #34
JonnieCache wrote: post #2

This isn't really a DAW. For those unfamiliar, a DAW is a fully-featured music creation environment including sound design, composition, recording, arrangement and mixing in one interface. Examples include logic, cubase and ableton. While I suppose this does allow for all of those things, as much as any programming language with access to an audio API does, this would be better described as a web-based DSP livecoding…

In my head, a DAW is exactly what it says. A workstation for digital audio. That said, this has the potential to evolve to something more similar to existing professional DAWs and maybe even surpass them. I'm glad you like it. The sound is generated purely by a JavaScript function returning sample values that are then handled by the Web Audio API and buffered. That's how you hear sound. On edit: It's really easy to r…

Have you looked at the work of Bret Victor? Integrating some of his concepts for realtime feedback would be awesome (see http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming and http://worrydream.com/#!2/LadderOfAbstraction)
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