10 ms·

That is very cool! Just spent a bit of time playing with it, and while I wouldn't say I was a 303/808 connoisseur (unlike a friend who is pretty famous for his

That is very cool! Just spent a bit of time playing with it, and while I wouldn't say I was a 303/808 connoisseur (unlike a friend who is pretty famous for his use of them), sounds pretty good to me; it's not perfect (it sounds like the filters aren't quite there in terms of extreme settings of resonance and envelope), but it's good. I've not used RB338 for years, so it could be mis-remembering, but it's almost like the sounds need controls that 'go to 11' to get to where you'd want them to be? I like the simplicity of it and the ease of producing a WAV from a session, and the UI seems to be simple and straightforward to use. I'll test it out on some students this week, see what they come up with. I have a couple of minor criticisms - I don't think the ballistics of the rotary controls is right, but I can't quite put my finger on -why-, just seems a bit too sensitive or there's something about the linearity of it? Would it be possible to add the Cubase-style "shift reduces the sensitivity while dragging" to them? The other thing was editing the grid - I'd prefer left click to toggle an event on and off rather than right-click to clear; while this is personal preference, it's one that I've got used to using Cubase for 20 years or so in the drum editor, so it's a little counter-intuitive to have to do it another way, and I think many other editors are similar? Finally, any chance of an undo in the editor? But overall, love it. An amazing demonstration of what's possible in a browser, and of your skills!

mrob 10y ago
>it's almost like the sounds need controls that 'go to 11' to get to where you'd want them to be? People modded the real hardware to do just that (eg. Real World Interfaces' Devil Fish mod: http://www.firstpr.com.au/rwi/dfish/ http://www.firstpr.com.au/rwi/dfish/ ). I'm not enough of a 303 connoisseur either to say if this softsynth is realistic or not, but maybe you're remembering the sound of modded hardware.
- djaychela 10y ago
  No, I'm pretty sure I'm thinking of RB-338, and definitely not a modded one; I had access to a 303 back in the day for a few weeks and it could have been that, but it was definitely standard. My friend I mentioned before has a number of 303s, both standard and modded, and showed me some of the extreme settings he gets on them (everything he makes is properly extreme!), but I don't know 100% that RB-338 wasn't more extreme than standard.
  - laumars 10y ago
    Off topic, but who is this friend you speak of? TB-303 was one of the synths I always drooled over as a kid, though I do think that it's legend is perhaps bigger than the synth itself was. Going back to this Show HN: this is an awesome project. Sounds good (albeit I too can't comment on accuracy) and performs well too (ie it doesn't appear to grind my browser to a halt like many technical demos do). The UX could use a little work but frankly few DAWs have good UX in my opinion so this is at least as good as the professional products in that department.
    - djaychela 10y ago
      Jon Bell aka Captain Tinrib [1] I'm kinda the same with the 303; I have enjoyed playing with them, but never got what some others can do out of them, but I think a lot is the music you're into - I was far more into prog stuff so never really got on that well with pattern-based sequencers. [1] http://tinribdigital.com/ http://tinribdigital.com/
      - laumars 10y ago
        Ahhh yes I'm familiar with Tinribs stuff. Met the guy several times too. Genuinely nice guy.
        djaychela 10y ago
        Yeah, I had the pleasure of going to school with Jon, and he really is a top man. Quite, quite mad though, he's done some crazy stuff!
exolab 10y ago
You should take a look at Andre Michelle's work. https://www.audiotool.com/ https://www.audiotool.com/
- aikah 10y ago
  audiotool is made with Flash. And a good demonstration of the actual usefulness of Flash to develop complex applications that could be deployed online. Too bad Adobe was incapable of taking good care of that product and didn't listen the community. I'm sure WebAudio can get better, but the OP's demo still proves that it's brittle. Changing anything in the patterns stops all sounds and the sequencer has hard time keeping a consistent tempo. I'm sure it will get better but Flash was really in advance for its time as audiotool demonstrated. Well, at least now people have stopped complaining about Flash "killing their battery". They can now blame Javascript /s
  - tiseindbaas 10y ago
    the fluctuating tempo is due to a poor approach of OP and proves or disproves nothing regarding web audio. that stuff can be as steady as you want.
    - errozero 10y ago
      The tempo does not fluctuate on my setup. That is something I really tried to eliminate. Can I ask what browser, OS and computer spec do you use?
    - errozero 10y ago
      This is the approach to scheduling I used if anyone is interested: https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/audio/scheduling/ https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/audio/scheduling/ I also tried to minimize any visual events that cause a repaint on the main instrument screen.
      - tulihauki 10y ago
        I've found that a steady method for timing is by calculating the number of samples to render per "tick" and decrement the counter after each completed sample when rendering audio to the buffer in JavaScriptNode/ScriptProcessor. Eg. samples_to_tick=Math.floor( (125.0/bpm) * (1.0/50.0)*sampleRate ); Upon the counter reaching zero, the render loop actually jumps to do sequencing and effects/modulation and then resets to counter. In my case, the tick occurs at 50Hz because that's the PAL frame clock used in Amiga and MS-DOS module trackers like Scream Tracker and FastTracker 2. Typically trackers use a "speed" setting to additionally specify the number of ticks per pattern step - usually 6. Although you do get sample-accurate timing, you also get latency up to the size of a single audio buffer (I use 4096 samples). While this isn't really an issue when doing purely playback, it obviously is when the audio is controlled real-time (eg. MIDI). Anyway - the module player is at http://mod.haxor.fi/ http://mod.haxor.fi/ and the source code at https://github.com/jhalme/webaudio-mod-player https://github.com/jhalme/webaudio-mod-player
errozero 10y ago
I did do a lot of back and forth testing with Rebirth, and the VST plugin: ABL3 whilst developing this and specifically whilst setting the max values for the cutoff, resonance and env.mod. - The tricky thing is that they all have an affect on each other, the max resonance is lower when the cutoff is lower for example. Regarding the rotary controls: These work by measuring the distance in pixels from the point you first clicked to the point the mouse have moved to. I only managed to test this on a 3 different computers so I think if you have a really high resolution, the knobs will move too fast. I'll change this at some point to be percentage based instead of pixel based. I added the right-click to delete as that is how FL-Studio works, which is my favorite daw. Its handy to keep the left click as you can use it to select a note in the drum editor and then set velocity. Thanks for checking it out!
- angersock 10y ago
  Please fix the rotary controls. Use the atan2 of the mouse's current window position minus the position of the dial's center to calculate the "current angle"/offset of the dial. I'm just waking up, so there might be slightly more to it than that, but not much. The current solution is just bad bad bad. :( Awesome project otherwise. :)
  - errozero 10y ago
    I will look into it now that it has been mentioned a few times.
    - chillingeffect 10y ago
      i agree with cannam above. Many people prefer the vertical motion to change values.
  - cannam 10y ago
    It's impossible to please everyone with rotary controls. If I read you correctly, you're asking for them to be controlled by actual rotary movement of the mouse. Many people dislike that (and I'm one of them) because it's hard to make circular motions smoothly. Meanwhile, the rest of the people dislike linearly-mapped rotary controls because the motion doesn't match the visual form of the control. I would have suggested making them respond linearly, but to both x and y motion. That is, the effective position change is the maximum of the mouse x and y axis displacements from the click position. My view is that rotary motion is not useful in an on-screen GUI (unless you have a MS Surface Dial perhaps?); rotary-looking controls only exist to save space and provide a friendly appearance. The way they actually behave should be whatever is most efficient to drive, regardless of their shape.
louthy 10y ago
> I wouldn't say I was a 303/808 connoisseur I would, I own a real TB-303 (as well as a TR-808 and a TR-909), and this suffers from the same problems that all emulations suffer (even Roland's own TR-3 and TR-03): the sound is really 'static'; real 303s have an instability in the sound that gives them a nice natural vibrato, which at the extremes (resonance full, and sweeping the cut-off), causes mini-ripples of sound that give the 303 that sound. Have a listen to this to see what I mean (try to avoid the Roland shills with their "it's just as good" opinion) [1] It's pretty much the same with all emulations of analogue gear. I am yet to hear any plugin or emulation come close to the sound of analogue. The closest I've experienced to-date Uhe Diva, but even that doesn't have the liveliness of the real deal. [1] https://youtu.be/4lhXeTGMo2c?t=796 https://youtu.be/4lhXeTGMo2c?t=796
- beedogs 10y ago
  Roland's reissues are pretty dull and lifeless compared to the real thing. The x0xb0x and possibly the TT-303 are the only two 303 clones I've heard that get close, probably due to the fact they're close copies of the original's analog circuitry. But even they don't quite get there. That's why the 303 still commands such a high price, even after Roland's ACB reissues. The 909 and 808 are a lot easier to clone.
  - Hydraulix989 10y ago
    I thought x0xb0x did a single blind test and they were indistinguishable? http://www.ladyada.net/make/x0xb0x/samples.html http://www.ladyada.net/make/x0xb0x/samples.html
- dharma1 10y ago
  I agree. It's the instabilities and nonlinearities in analog audio that give it character. Now whether that's worth emulating, or even noticeable by most people, I'm not sure. But I'm buying all analog, and mostly VCO synths
  - problems 10y ago
    Curious if you'd notice similar from circuit emulator synths like Diva: https://www.u-he.com/cms/diva https://www.u-he.com/cms/diva
dopamean 10y ago
Who is your friend?

mrob 10y ago

>it's almost like the sounds need controls that 'go to 11' to get to where you'd want them to be? People modded the real hardware to do just that (eg. Real World Interfaces' Devil Fish mod: http://www.firstpr.com.au/rwi/dfish/ http://www.firstpr.com.au/rwi/dfish/ ). I'm not enough of a 303 connoisseur either to say if this softsynth is realistic or not, but maybe you're remembering the sound of modded hardware.

djaychela 10y ago
No, I'm pretty sure I'm thinking of RB-338, and definitely not a modded one; I had access to a 303 back in the day for a few weeks and it could have been that, but it was definitely standard. My friend I mentioned before has a number of 303s, both standard and modded, and showed me some of the extreme settings he gets on them (everything he makes is properly extreme!), but I don't know 100% that RB-338 wasn't more extreme than standard.
- laumars 10y ago
  Off topic, but who is this friend you speak of? TB-303 was one of the synths I always drooled over as a kid, though I do think that it's legend is perhaps bigger than the synth itself was. Going back to this Show HN: this is an awesome project. Sounds good (albeit I too can't comment on accuracy) and performs well too (ie it doesn't appear to grind my browser to a halt like many technical demos do). The UX could use a little work but frankly few DAWs have good UX in my opinion so this is at least as good as the professional products in that department.
  - djaychela 10y ago
    Jon Bell aka Captain Tinrib [1] I'm kinda the same with the 303; I have enjoyed playing with them, but never got what some others can do out of them, but I think a lot is the music you're into - I was far more into prog stuff so never really got on that well with pattern-based sequencers. [1] http://tinribdigital.com/ http://tinribdigital.com/
    - laumars 10y ago
      Ahhh yes I'm familiar with Tinribs stuff. Met the guy several times too. Genuinely nice guy.
      - djaychela 10y ago
        Yeah, I had the pleasure of going to school with Jon, and he really is a top man. Quite, quite mad though, he's done some crazy stuff!

exolab 10y ago

You should take a look at Andre Michelle's work. https://www.audiotool.com/ https://www.audiotool.com/

aikah 10y ago
audiotool is made with Flash. And a good demonstration of the actual usefulness of Flash to develop complex applications that could be deployed online. Too bad Adobe was incapable of taking good care of that product and didn't listen the community. I'm sure WebAudio can get better, but the OP's demo still proves that it's brittle. Changing anything in the patterns stops all sounds and the sequencer has hard time keeping a consistent tempo. I'm sure it will get better but Flash was really in advance for its time as audiotool demonstrated. Well, at least now people have stopped complaining about Flash "killing their battery". They can now blame Javascript /s
- tiseindbaas 10y ago
  the fluctuating tempo is due to a poor approach of OP and proves or disproves nothing regarding web audio. that stuff can be as steady as you want.
  - errozero 10y ago
    The tempo does not fluctuate on my setup. That is something I really tried to eliminate. Can I ask what browser, OS and computer spec do you use?
  - errozero 10y ago
    This is the approach to scheduling I used if anyone is interested: https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/audio/scheduling/ https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/audio/scheduling/ I also tried to minimize any visual events that cause a repaint on the main instrument screen.
    - tulihauki 10y ago
      I've found that a steady method for timing is by calculating the number of samples to render per "tick" and decrement the counter after each completed sample when rendering audio to the buffer in JavaScriptNode/ScriptProcessor. Eg. samples_to_tick=Math.floor( (125.0/bpm) * (1.0/50.0)*sampleRate ); Upon the counter reaching zero, the render loop actually jumps to do sequencing and effects/modulation and then resets to counter. In my case, the tick occurs at 50Hz because that's the PAL frame clock used in Amiga and MS-DOS module trackers like Scream Tracker and FastTracker 2. Typically trackers use a "speed" setting to additionally specify the number of ticks per pattern step - usually 6. Although you do get sample-accurate timing, you also get latency up to the size of a single audio buffer (I use 4096 samples). While this isn't really an issue when doing purely playback, it obviously is when the audio is controlled real-time (eg. MIDI). Anyway - the module player is at http://mod.haxor.fi/ http://mod.haxor.fi/ and the source code at https://github.com/jhalme/webaudio-mod-player https://github.com/jhalme/webaudio-mod-player

errozero 10y ago

I did do a lot of back and forth testing with Rebirth, and the VST plugin: ABL3 whilst developing this and specifically whilst setting the max values for the cutoff, resonance and env.mod. - The tricky thing is that they all have an affect on each other, the max resonance is lower when the cutoff is lower for example. Regarding the rotary controls: These work by measuring the distance in pixels from the point you first clicked to the point the mouse have moved to. I only managed to test this on a 3 different computers so I think if you have a really high resolution, the knobs will move too fast. I'll change this at some point to be percentage based instead of pixel based. I added the right-click to delete as that is how FL-Studio works, which is my favorite daw. Its handy to keep the left click as you can use it to select a note in the drum editor and then set velocity. Thanks for checking it out!

angersock 10y ago
Please fix the rotary controls. Use the atan2 of the mouse's current window position minus the position of the dial's center to calculate the "current angle"/offset of the dial. I'm just waking up, so there might be slightly more to it than that, but not much. The current solution is just bad bad bad. :( Awesome project otherwise. :)
- errozero 10y ago
  I will look into it now that it has been mentioned a few times.
  - chillingeffect 10y ago
    i agree with cannam above. Many people prefer the vertical motion to change values.
- cannam 10y ago
  It's impossible to please everyone with rotary controls. If I read you correctly, you're asking for them to be controlled by actual rotary movement of the mouse. Many people dislike that (and I'm one of them) because it's hard to make circular motions smoothly. Meanwhile, the rest of the people dislike linearly-mapped rotary controls because the motion doesn't match the visual form of the control. I would have suggested making them respond linearly, but to both x and y motion. That is, the effective position change is the maximum of the mouse x and y axis displacements from the click position. My view is that rotary motion is not useful in an on-screen GUI (unless you have a MS Surface Dial perhaps?); rotary-looking controls only exist to save space and provide a friendly appearance. The way they actually behave should be whatever is most efficient to drive, regardless of their shape.

louthy 10y ago

> I wouldn't say I was a 303/808 connoisseur I would, I own a real TB-303 (as well as a TR-808 and a TR-909), and this suffers from the same problems that all emulations suffer (even Roland's own TR-3 and TR-03): the sound is really 'static'; real 303s have an instability in the sound that gives them a nice natural vibrato, which at the extremes (resonance full, and sweeping the cut-off), causes mini-ripples of sound that give the 303 that sound. Have a listen to this to see what I mean (try to avoid the Roland shills with their "it's just as good" opinion) [1] It's pretty much the same with all emulations of analogue gear. I am yet to hear any plugin or emulation come close to the sound of analogue. The closest I've experienced to-date Uhe Diva, but even that doesn't have the liveliness of the real deal. [1] https://youtu.be/4lhXeTGMo2c?t=796 https://youtu.be/4lhXeTGMo2c?t=796

beedogs 10y ago
Roland's reissues are pretty dull and lifeless compared to the real thing. The x0xb0x and possibly the TT-303 are the only two 303 clones I've heard that get close, probably due to the fact they're close copies of the original's analog circuitry. But even they don't quite get there. That's why the 303 still commands such a high price, even after Roland's ACB reissues. The 909 and 808 are a lot easier to clone.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  I thought x0xb0x did a single blind test and they were indistinguishable? http://www.ladyada.net/make/x0xb0x/samples.html http://www.ladyada.net/make/x0xb0x/samples.html
dharma1 10y ago
I agree. It's the instabilities and nonlinearities in analog audio that give it character. Now whether that's worth emulating, or even noticeable by most people, I'm not sure. But I'm buying all analog, and mostly VCO synths
- problems 10y ago
  Curious if you'd notice similar from circuit emulator synths like Diva: https://www.u-he.com/cms/diva https://www.u-he.com/cms/diva

dopamean 10y ago

Who is your friend?