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AudioMass – free, open source, web-based Audio and Waveform editor

1011 points by zaiste 6y ago

ArtWomb 6y ago
Works great! Near-native web audio on the horizon ;) High Performance Web Audio with AudioWorklet in Firefox 76 https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/05/high-performance-web-audio-with-audioworklet-in-firefox/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/05/high-performance-web-audio...
- Tade0 6y ago
  I hope it lives up to its promises - one thing I noticed is using Web Audio on mobile devices is that I get sudden drops and crackling even with the simplest configurations which can't possibly affect the CPU to the point where they are the root cause. Interestingly, no such issues on desktop - at least not until I add some heavy processing.
- jordan314 6y ago
  I wonder if iOS is ever going to catch up, I'm still waiting for them to implement getFloatTimeDomainData(). https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/AnalyserNode/getFloatTimeDomainData https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/AnalyserNod...
dpflan 6y ago
This is the GitHub repo: https://github.com/pkalogiros/audiomass https://github.com/pkalogiros/audiomass (accessible under the "help" menu)
- skyfaller 6y ago
  Looks like they haven't added a license yet. I hope they do, if this is intended to be an open source project. https://github.com/pkalogiros/AudioMass/issues/1 https://github.com/pkalogiros/AudioMass/issues/1
  - dpflan 6y ago
    Absolutely agree: the repo is active so waiting a license to be pushed.
  - contravariant 6y ago
    They're telling people to please checkout the repo and have fun, which I think is almost a license in and of itself (of course you are then legally obliged to have fun should you choose to use the license), but explicit is better than implicit in these cases.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      "Checkout and have fun" does not say anything about redistribution, however.
welcometomiami 6y ago
Really slick! Love this.
mrspeaker 6y ago
Wow, that's fantastic... one thing I noticed instantly is that (to me) the UI/UX is so intuitive. I use Audacity a lot, and the UI on that for core operations: zooming, unzooming, trimming, selecting... is so much more clunky (I can never figure out how to "unzoom") - it drives me mad every time. This one one intuitive and natural. I'd have to evaluate how file system handling worked, but just based on the UI and snappiness - I'd use this over Audacity for any quick-n-dirty audio editing tasks. Really cool!
- bbx 6y ago
  Agreed. Audacity is great for quick audio editing but the selecting/dragging/zooming experience is quite annoying. It would be great to have Ableton’s bird-eye view feature, it’s super intuitive and really responsive.
dintech 6y ago
This is great! When working with large files, I'd like zoom in/out to be a bit snappier. I'd also like right click -> zoom to selection.
andoma 6y ago
Features vs page load time is very impressive.
- vezycash 6y ago
  According to the about page, it's 65KB.
goodmachine 6y ago
Impressive. Back in the day, SoundEdit16 was the thing. I hope they clone or skin it like that
kethinov 6y ago
This would make a good Electron app so it can also be used offline by regular people who don't want to or are unable to fuss with command line web servers.
- yadco 6y ago
  Or a progressive web app that can be installed and work offline.
  - vezycash 6y ago
    It works offline. Click help - Store offline. Or just click this https://audiomass.co/index-cache.html https://audiomass.co/index-cache.html I've tested it. Disconnected wifi went to https://audiomass.co https://audiomass.co and it worked.
maxwellito 6y ago
Very simple, but clean, works like a charm, perfect set of effect and import/export features. I need to check if it works as a PWA. Kudos to the creator!
bvm 6y ago
Reminds me of the audio editor that shipped with Windows...95? Had some great times with that thing reversing everything in earshot, doing reverse reverb etc etc edit: this thing https://i.imgur.com/UXqSteO.png https://i.imgur.com/UXqSteO.png
- rpastuszak 6y ago
  Ha, I remember how proud I was when I discovered a "hack" to increase the max recording duration (from 30s to X minutes[⋆]): 1. record silence 2. copy paste the recording till you achieve the desired length 3. start recording from the beginning On AudioMass and its performance/snappiness: this feels much more smooth than Audacity on my MBP, so I'll give it a shot soon. ⋆ or: whatever the memory limitations of your PC were
- Jaruzel 6y ago
  sndrec32.exe - I think it's last appearance was Windows XP (or maybe 7, I don't have either to check). It a shame it's gone tbh, it was a REALLY quick way to just playback an audio file, without all that extra baggage that later playback apps had (iTunes clones).
soperj 6y ago
If i could suggest anything it would be a way to make a selection while playing. Like hold down shift, press space bar, and then press space bar again, and it's all selected.
jugg1es 6y ago
Impressive - always amazed at the low-level stuff you can do in browsers nowadays. Nice job.
microcolonel 6y ago
It'll be very fun over the years, for whoever is tasked with it, to fix all of the bugs bugs common to audio editors like this. My favourite one is how, depending on when, resizing the selection while playing with loop enabled can cause the cursor to escape the selection (!). That was the first one I checked for when I opened this up.
caiobegotti 6y ago
Nice spectrum analyzer!
radiowave 6y ago
Was really not expecting to be impressed by this, but it's excellent. The inclusion of a spectrogram is a very nice touch. The ability to preview EQ changes while the audio is playing back is impresssive, although the x-axis scale on the parametric isn't helpful - everything below 1kHz is squashed into the left-most 10% of the plot. Some small nitpicks are that it's currently quite fiddly to use the compressor without a gain reduction meter, and my usual bugbear with simpler audio editors: that fade-outs are almost never useful unless you can alter the curve. But the fact that this is working so smoothly in a browser at all, and in Firefox to boot, is really commendable.
- rectang 6y ago
  It also has my usual bugbear in that fades are calculated linearly rather than logarithmically as humans actually perceive loudness. (Decibels are logarithmic for a reason.) How come so many apps get this wrong? This is really basic psychoacoustics, and linear fades sound terrible! > fade-outs are almost never useful unless you can alter the curve. I agree, but would like to add that you should be altering a logarithmic curve.
  - pantelisk 6y ago
    You are 100% correct. I guess it's because it's a js developer doing audio, instead of an audio engineer doing js! So I have a lot to learn, most of the plugins have minor issues, but I 'll be focusing in correcting those when I get the chance!
    - vel0city 6y ago
      I agree with the above posters. Things like normalize as well should also probably have their value expressed as dB as that's kind of the industry norm from what I understand. I do have to say, this is a super cool tool and I've definitely bookmarked it. I normally use tools like Audacity to quickly record, trim, and normalize audio tracks so this tool fits my use cases very well. Thanks for sharing!
    - rectang 6y ago
mikece 6y ago
My first thought: add WebRTC voice chat and the ability to record all participants in separate channels... would be awesome for podcast recording!
_benj 6y ago
this brings me back to the days of cool edit pro! (Idk why!) but it is amazing that you can do that in a browser nowadays! If I were to be super critical my only pet peeve has to do with the style of the menu :P The color (dark on light) seems disconnected from the rest of the app design and those big rounded corners gives the app a little bit of a toy-ish look (My point of reference for "pro" is something like Adobe Audition, Presonus StudioOne, Pro Tools, etc... kind of look) But that is just a personal preference (this is the radius I'm talking about https://github.com/pkalogiros/AudioMass/blob/master/src/main.css#L61 https://github.com/pkalogiros/AudioMass/blob/master/src/main...) But the project look awesome! keep it up!
cjohansson 6y ago
Amazing stuff, thanks for sharing. Works great in my iPhone 6 browser
pantelisk 6y ago
Hello hackernews! I am the author! Wow, I can't believe the attention this is getting! Hopefully this proves to be useful as a tool, and not just as a JS demo! :) The next plans are - redo drawing library to further improve performance! - polish a bit some audio plugins (like the paragraphic EQ) since some parts feel a bit off (the limiter, paragraphic eq for example). - Add some tutorials! Some things might not be straightforward like using Shift + [keys] for shortcuts etc. - Easier recording mode (like the ability to open a new empty audio project) - Multitrack mode, for more channels! - play a bit more with the concept of having different windows that can be in different screens (check out the frequency analyzer under "view") To answer a few questions, I plan to have a very open license this is just a fun side project for me. but I need to figure out the licenses of some libs I am using first (eg wavesurfer, lzma-wasm) and do proper attribution! Thanks again! PS. I wrote this in 2018, and just kept it on my hard disk until recently, so certain features might be slightly different than back then :)
- chpmrc 6y ago
  This is one of the coolest web apps I've ever seen. How it handles multiple windows, docking, local drafts. Wow, well done!
- Tade0 6y ago
  The next plans are - redo drawing library to further improve performance! I'm amazed that you still have ideas regarding improvements here, because at least the selection performance is buttery-smooth even on a phone. Great job, very useful product.
  - BubRoss 6y ago
    Soundforge on a 486 100Mhz was already pretty fast at editing a single track of audio. It's amazing how much heavy frameworks have warped our perception of normal interactivity.
    - Tade0 6y ago
      I had a 486 and did some rudimentary audio editing back then. I remember the performance to be decent, but not 60fps-decent. But aside from that phones usually have relatively infrequent touch updates, which usually results in a single repaint on every such event, so 10FPS or so.
pea 6y ago
Awesome - kind of reminds me of the Renoise interface!
gtm1260 6y ago
I open Audacity about once every 3 months for some random audio editing, this is definitely a better/more intuitive app. Plus web based is awesome for something I use so infrequently. Great Work!
- svth 6y ago
  Don't knock Audacity, though. Fantastically useful piece of software.
ctrager 6y ago
Please forgive me for being self-centered. I DO think AudioMass is great. I'm running it locally and I even contributed by posting a legit issue in github. But here's the self-centered part: The other day I posted a "Show HN" for something web audio related that I wrote and got crickets so I'd like to try again: https://ctrager.github.io/music_tools https://ctrager.github.io/music_tools. Especially check out "Pitch Detector". All three tools are standalone single HTML files that don't need a server.
- ximeng 6y ago
  These are interesting tools. Pitch detector didn't seem to work too well for me but no doubt my bad singing. You could probably just show both clefs with the relevant clef symbol at the beginning rather than making it an option. For the beat detector, it would be interesting to see average distance from the beat in order to try to improve. It could be a game following a rhythm easily. Think for HN you probably need a quick demo that will attract more of the large number of people who are not necessarily going to use this tool long term. Give people a hook. Also keep trying, because it's pretty random what gets voted up on any one day. I think with some development and innovation this could be a useful tool. You've also not got any contact info which makes it harder for interested people to get in touch if they like your stuff.
  - ctrager 6y ago
    I can't really make it work with singing either, but it works well when I play violin. My motivation is just pitch, to give feedback to me playing violin or my wife trying to learn viola.
    - Cactus2018 6y ago
      Check out "Intonia", works brilliantly with stringed instruments
      - ctrager 6y ago
        I had tried it briefly because my favorite youtube violin teacher Beth Blackerby recommended it in one of her videos, and it's great. But, I wanted the experience of coding something myself (I'm retired, hadn't coded in four years, lockdown has made me antsy) and I wanted something that was a standalone single HTML file, and I wanted something that felt easier. So, I ignore the time dimension and paint the notes on the staff the way a player is used to reading them rather than Intonia's interface which looks more technical.
kpmah 6y ago
Very nice! I've recently tried covering some similar ground for a side project (https://forkjam.com/new https://forkjam.com/new) so I have an idea of how much work this is. I take it you took the approach of using WASM for audio decoders?
01walid 6y ago
For a second I thought this is a WebAssembly app :) Nice job!
PdTheTech 6y ago
This is awesome. As an avid past user of Cool Edit 2000 and Adobe Edition 1.5, I love this project. Fantastic to see something familiar in a browser. As a bonus it hits me right in the nostalgia. I'll be watching and supporting this!
kube-system 6y ago
When I try to play the sample in Brave I only get sound for a couple of seconds before it goes quiet. In FF it works correctly.
kevindeasis 6y ago
It took me a few seconds on how to use this, but once I figured it out, I was like, damn, this is pretty cool! I wish there was a cli for this
jjice 6y ago
We have Photopea (https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/) for images, and now we have AudioMass for audio. I love these open source, web based tools that work fantastic. Great job!
- detaro 6y ago
  Wait, Photopea is open source?!
  - edoceo 6y ago
    https://github.com/photopea/photopea https://github.com/photopea/photopea
    - detaro 6y ago
      That's a repo with a Readme and 4 image files for the logo...
      - djsumdog 6y ago
        Yes, and it clearly says it's not open source in the README: > Since Photopea is not fully open-source, this account serves as a place for bug reports and general discussion.
      - edoceo 6y ago
        Yep, that's what I was showing. It's got a GitHub but it's not FOSS
        kupopuffs 6y ago
        Just a link is not really showing. Everyone knows nobody clicks on the links, we demand instant explanations!
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    It's not, though the author [0] posts here from time to time and it's still free software. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=IvanK_net https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=IvanK_net
city41 6y ago
It appears the entire app was written with vanilla JS. That's just an observation. I wouldn't have expected that nowadays. The app is super impressive!
- jacquesm 6y ago
  That's a huge plus in my book. Frameworks tend to obscure what the application actually does because there is orders of magnitude more framework code than there is application code, and frameworks tend to be very indirect when going about their business with 12 different layers hit for a simple operation.
  - city41 6y ago
    As a counter, if you look at the code, there's a lot of DOM api calls littered throughout which obscure what is going on. This could be relieved by pulling out the DOM manipulation into common constructs that all parts of the app use, but then you're creating your own framework/library and might be better off using a battle tested one.
    - lucideer 6y ago
      Given how responsive the UI is compared to most modern UIs built in the "battle tested" frameworks & libraries, I suspect the recommendations in this comment are all well and good in theory, but not necessarily reflective of reality in practice.
- goldforever 6y ago
  Noticed that too!
thinkloop 6y ago
These are the exact tools I am constantly looking for. Full browser sandbox for no stress "install", local-first, offline-first, so you own your own data - then option for locally encrypted cloud backups. I am almost 100% web now, I use very few installed programs and am constantly trying to get that to zero. One day someone is going to collect all these best-in-class web tools and make a proper chromebook where the user owns their own data.
andai 6y ago
This is really cool, thanks for sharing! I'm noticed my CPU fan at full blast and checked my processes (then Chrome task manager), I had left it open an it was using 80-95% CPU in the background. Tested again, it seems to be the spectrum analyzer (even after I pause playback, or close the analyzer window).
deeblering4 6y ago
This us great! Kinda reminds me of cool edit pro (two point oooooh)
ubercow13 6y ago
Does this load the whole file into memory while it's being worked on? What if you tried to load a file that is too big? I wonder with these more complex productivity web-apps becoming more common, how something like a video editor might work that needs to work on data too large to put in memory.
- pantelisk 6y ago
  Yes, it is all in memory. I am taking advantage for IndexDB for local drafts. And localstorage for plugin presets. But it does not match the flexibility of being able to create lots of big uncompressed files and cache in the disk while workign on a project. So everything needs to use lower fidelity settings, or do things like compress WAV files in a lossless way with LZMA since other avenues are too heavy. I am not seeing this becoming something like Audacity or Audition replacement, but a quick tool for modifying audio files on the fly.
croisillon 6y ago
May I ask, what the sample music is? Sounds like a movie score but Shazam doesn't recognizes it.
- pantelisk 6y ago
  Haha, it's something I wrote a long time ago (around 10 years back). I wrote it in Cubase and if I recall correctly Symphobia was the primary VST used. I had way more time back then for music than I do now. If you like the piece feel free to grab it (test.mp3 in the github repo). Cheers!
  - croisillon 6y ago
    Thanks! It's a bummer though: it sounds like a movie I'd like to watch :D
inflam52 6y ago
Great work!!! I've been wanting to do something like this for a while. I'm glad someone is leveraging the web to build a real open source DAW!
waprin 6y ago
Really great project, nice job author, hoping to use it as a starting point/inspiration for some projects of my own.
jacquesm 6y ago
This is smack in the path of Audacity, very nice work. Is it possible to load midi synchronized to an audio file? That's a weak point in Audacity, it can't really edit the midi as you go through the audio and for some tasks that would be extremely useful to have.
dsco 6y ago
Now slap cloud storage, collaborative editing/highlighting and paid accounts on it - this is impressive software!
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Soundcloud meets Github!
anigbrowl 6y ago
8/10, very promising. feels like Cooledit/Audition, which was for a long time the best of its class (Pro T Tools is the industry standard but that's based on long years of hardware-lock-in). Allow local instances and add Lua or similar user scripting and you've got a winner. Well done.
pantelisk 6y ago
Author again here! Now that this is finally sunsetting, I feel a bit more comfortable writing some things I 've learnt today! - First of all, I am amazed at the suggestions and love this is getting. I have been dog fooding it by using it to quickly edit foley audio from a tascam hand-microphone device, in order to make some cheap sound effects for a game project I am working on. The point is, I thought I was aware of all bugs, and all areas of improvement, and I am humbled to have my mind opened and see how valuable outside perspectives are! It's so easy get tunnel vision and think you know best I guess. - Secondly... as I said I wrote this in June 2018, and just... kept it... I guess I was afraid of sharing it to the world, perhaps the audio people would get mad at me for making mistakes with the audio api (like the fade in/fade out being linear). Perhaps the javascript people would make fun of me for just using Vanilla JS. But if this is impressive in 2020, imagine how impressive it would have been back in 2018! So I guess my point is. Share your work! Do not be afraid to put it out there! - If anyone is interested on how it is built, and how the interface complexities are managed, even though it is just plain old school JS that has the reputation of being notoriously difficult to maintain, I would be happy to make a write-up shortly, or perhaps give a talk on it. - Third... (hopefully that is ok). If you like AudioMass, and like the way it is built and it performs, perhaps you might enjoy working together with me. We are doing cutting edge computer vision, and well.. some CRUD stuff too! My company is hiring (info in my profile). But please be advised that due to covid-19 things may take longer or may not be fully up to date. PS. As for license, I will probably choose something like "wtfpl.net". if it can help you learn something, or build something, go ahead! If you noticed, the page doesn't have any tracking (I realy don't know how many visitors came (I also disabled nginx logs)). And of course no ads at all. I 'm just trying to build cool and useful stuff!
- sam1r 6y ago
  This is great! I’d love to help contribute. Would you be interested in adding flac support? Imagine the future interface with flac + svg + you’re already well-performant foundation with audio mass
  - pantelisk 6y ago
    Yes! Flac support is important, thank you for the suggestion. I would expect it to be already supported https://caniuse.com/#search=flac https://caniuse.com/#search=flac and I am just using web audio functions it should decode fine (but it's not). Maybe I am overzealously filtering for formats! And performance is fine, but it can be so but soooo much better! Like just by adding sprinkling some wasm or asmjs in the "onaudioprocess" loops, to speed up the buffer traversing loops and escape the dreaded garbage collector!
kennyangel 6y ago
nice work
TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
I dabble from time to time with mixin rekids, and am presently trying to find an audio editor for simple cut n paste that Audacity. Must support MacOS. What's is out there? My DuckFu is letting me down in this instance. I'll give AudioMass a spin over the weekend, and like others have said if it could be a standalone Electron-based app that would probably work, and happy to throw a few antipodean dineros at it.
false_kermit 6y ago
Very cool! I tried doing some signal processing stuff back in the day and got absolutely discouraged after discovering how much linear algebra was involved. I particularly appreciate the ability to preview compression. Compression is probably what I use most when I'm editing audio and having that at my fingertips without loading Audacity or Ableton would be super nice for quick, rough changes. One thing that I'd really like to see would be a de-essing plugin, or even better a multiband compressor.
dharma1 6y ago
nice, was just looking for a free audio editor and could only find things that look like they're from the 90's (Audacity). .wav export would be grand!
xchip 6y ago
thanks!
suyash 6y ago
Good job, like to see some good tutorials.
dharma1 6y ago
Would be great if there was a VST like standard for audio effect plugins for web, so that many web-based audio apps could use the same plugins. Saw something like that but for synths - https://www.webaudiomodules.org/wamsynths/ https://www.webaudiomodules.org/wamsynths/
- pantelisk 6y ago
  That's insane! I 'm actually working on a lite-daw for web, so this is extremely interesting to me. However I do not plan to go very far. My angle is that this should be a tool to experiment and try out things with minimal friction, then for any serious work, perhaps users can look into professional solutions. Perhaps also take advantage of the web's collaborative nature and have multiple users share a session! There are decades of research, feedback loops and work put into tools such as FruityLoops, Cubase, ProTools etc, and the thought of reimplementing parts of it for web is such a daunting task.
  - dharma1 6y ago
    Multiplayer would be sweet for a web DAW, it rocks in design tools like Figma. I think you are right, a light DAW would cover 80% of people's needs. And as long as you can export the track as midi and audio bounces, you could always continue it in a native DAW. I would love to collab if you need UI/UX for this btw? I've worked on audio and DAW stuff for a long time, as well as open source. What's the best way to reach?
12bits 6y ago
This looks really cool, by the nature of my user name I must greedily request vintage sampler modes. :)
wigl 6y ago
I would love the ability to label and extract sections like in audacity! That’s the only thing missing from my use case
- pantelisk 6y ago
  You can extract sections (as mp3 by selecting, and then File > Extract mp3 > current selection). Or File > Save Local Draft (and you can open the selection as a standalone audio project). Being able to label things with markers and different colors though would be fantastic! It's in the plans, once a bit better audio handling of slices (eg cross-fading, mix-dragging etc) is added!
  - wigl 6y ago
    I noticed that and I do think it is nice. I have to extract and transcribe long sequences, so it would be nice to have the audacity label track feature to bookmark/label a bunch of sections and then output them as individual files named by their label along with a .txt. This is audacity's format: start end label_name 1.02302 2.23193 label_1 You could take it further and have some numeric labeling (audacity doesn't autofill) and that'd be even nicer. This would be super helpful for working with speech processing data. Regardless, keep up the good work!
aswanson 6y ago
The UI is cool looking.
bulldog13 6y ago
How do I delete a highlighted section? I feel like I am missing something simple.

1011 points by zaiste 6y ago

Works great! Near-native web audio on the horizon ;) High Performance Web Audio with AudioWorklet in Firefox 76 https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/05/high-performance-web-audio-with-audioworklet-in-firefox/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/05/high-performance-web-audio...

Tade0 6y ago
I hope it lives up to its promises - one thing I noticed is using Web Audio on mobile devices is that I get sudden drops and crackling even with the simplest configurations which can't possibly affect the CPU to the point where they are the root cause. Interestingly, no such issues on desktop - at least not until I add some heavy processing.
jordan314 6y ago
I wonder if iOS is ever going to catch up, I'm still waiting for them to implement getFloatTimeDomainData(). https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/AnalyserNode/getFloatTimeDomainData https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/AnalyserNod...

dpflan 6y ago

This is the GitHub repo: https://github.com/pkalogiros/audiomass https://github.com/pkalogiros/audiomass (accessible under the "help" menu)

skyfaller 6y ago
Looks like they haven't added a license yet. I hope they do, if this is intended to be an open source project. https://github.com/pkalogiros/AudioMass/issues/1 https://github.com/pkalogiros/AudioMass/issues/1
- dpflan 6y ago
  Absolutely agree: the repo is active so waiting a license to be pushed.
- contravariant 6y ago
  They're telling people to please checkout the repo and have fun, which I think is almost a license in and of itself (of course you are then legally obliged to have fun should you choose to use the license), but explicit is better than implicit in these cases.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    "Checkout and have fun" does not say anything about redistribution, however.

welcometomiami 6y ago

Really slick! Love this.

mrspeaker 6y ago

Wow, that's fantastic... one thing I noticed instantly is that (to me) the UI/UX is so intuitive. I use Audacity a lot, and the UI on that for core operations: zooming, unzooming, trimming, selecting... is so much more clunky (I can never figure out how to "unzoom") - it drives me mad every time. This one one intuitive and natural. I'd have to evaluate how file system handling worked, but just based on the UI and snappiness - I'd use this over Audacity for any quick-n-dirty audio editing tasks. Really cool!

bbx 6y ago
Agreed. Audacity is great for quick audio editing but the selecting/dragging/zooming experience is quite annoying. It would be great to have Ableton’s bird-eye view feature, it’s super intuitive and really responsive.

dintech 6y ago

This is great! When working with large files, I'd like zoom in/out to be a bit snappier. I'd also like right click -> zoom to selection.

andoma 6y ago

Features vs page load time is very impressive.

vezycash 6y ago
According to the about page, it's 65KB.

goodmachine 6y ago

Impressive. Back in the day, SoundEdit16 was the thing. I hope they clone or skin it like that

kethinov 6y ago

This would make a good Electron app so it can also be used offline by regular people who don't want to or are unable to fuss with command line web servers.

yadco 6y ago
Or a progressive web app that can be installed and work offline.
- vezycash 6y ago
  It works offline. Click help - Store offline. Or just click this https://audiomass.co/index-cache.html https://audiomass.co/index-cache.html I've tested it. Disconnected wifi went to https://audiomass.co https://audiomass.co and it worked.

maxwellito 6y ago

Very simple, but clean, works like a charm, perfect set of effect and import/export features. I need to check if it works as a PWA. Kudos to the creator!

bvm 6y ago

Reminds me of the audio editor that shipped with Windows...95? Had some great times with that thing reversing everything in earshot, doing reverse reverb etc etc edit: this thing https://i.imgur.com/UXqSteO.png https://i.imgur.com/UXqSteO.png

rpastuszak 6y ago
Ha, I remember how proud I was when I discovered a "hack" to increase the max recording duration (from 30s to X minutes[⋆]): 1. record silence 2. copy paste the recording till you achieve the desired length 3. start recording from the beginning On AudioMass and its performance/snappiness: this feels much more smooth than Audacity on my MBP, so I'll give it a shot soon. ⋆ or: whatever the memory limitations of your PC were
Jaruzel 6y ago
sndrec32.exe - I think it's last appearance was Windows XP (or maybe 7, I don't have either to check). It a shame it's gone tbh, it was a REALLY quick way to just playback an audio file, without all that extra baggage that later playback apps had (iTunes clones).

soperj 6y ago

If i could suggest anything it would be a way to make a selection while playing. Like hold down shift, press space bar, and then press space bar again, and it's all selected.

jugg1es 6y ago

Impressive - always amazed at the low-level stuff you can do in browsers nowadays. Nice job.

microcolonel 6y ago

It'll be very fun over the years, for whoever is tasked with it, to fix all of the bugs bugs common to audio editors like this. My favourite one is how, depending on when, resizing the selection while playing with loop enabled can cause the cursor to escape the selection (!). That was the first one I checked for when I opened this up.

caiobegotti 6y ago

Nice spectrum analyzer!

radiowave 6y ago

Was really not expecting to be impressed by this, but it's excellent. The inclusion of a spectrogram is a very nice touch. The ability to preview EQ changes while the audio is playing back is impresssive, although the x-axis scale on the parametric isn't helpful - everything below 1kHz is squashed into the left-most 10% of the plot. Some small nitpicks are that it's currently quite fiddly to use the compressor without a gain reduction meter, and my usual bugbear with simpler audio editors: that fade-outs are almost never useful unless you can alter the curve. But the fact that this is working so smoothly in a browser at all, and in Firefox to boot, is really commendable.

rectang 6y ago
It also has my usual bugbear in that fades are calculated linearly rather than logarithmically as humans actually perceive loudness. (Decibels are logarithmic for a reason.) How come so many apps get this wrong? This is really basic psychoacoustics, and linear fades sound terrible! > fade-outs are almost never useful unless you can alter the curve. I agree, but would like to add that you should be altering a logarithmic curve.
- pantelisk 6y ago
  You are 100% correct. I guess it's because it's a js developer doing audio, instead of an audio engineer doing js! So I have a lot to learn, most of the plugins have minor issues, but I 'll be focusing in correcting those when I get the chance!
  - vel0city 6y ago
    I agree with the above posters. Things like normalize as well should also probably have their value expressed as dB as that's kind of the industry norm from what I understand. I do have to say, this is a super cool tool and I've definitely bookmarked it. I normally use tools like Audacity to quickly record, trim, and normalize audio tracks so this tool fits my use cases very well. Thanks for sharing!
  - rectang 6y ago

mikece 6y ago

My first thought: add WebRTC voice chat and the ability to record all participants in separate channels... would be awesome for podcast recording!

_benj 6y ago

this brings me back to the days of cool edit pro! (Idk why!) but it is amazing that you can do that in a browser nowadays! If I were to be super critical my only pet peeve has to do with the style of the menu :P The color (dark on light) seems disconnected from the rest of the app design and those big rounded corners gives the app a little bit of a toy-ish look (My point of reference for "pro" is something like Adobe Audition, Presonus StudioOne, Pro Tools, etc... kind of look) But that is just a personal preference (this is the radius I'm talking about https://github.com/pkalogiros/AudioMass/blob/master/src/main.css#L61 https://github.com/pkalogiros/AudioMass/blob/master/src/main...) But the project look awesome! keep it up!

cjohansson 6y ago

Amazing stuff, thanks for sharing. Works great in my iPhone 6 browser

pantelisk 6y ago

Hello hackernews! I am the author! Wow, I can't believe the attention this is getting! Hopefully this proves to be useful as a tool, and not just as a JS demo! :) The next plans are - redo drawing library to further improve performance! - polish a bit some audio plugins (like the paragraphic EQ) since some parts feel a bit off (the limiter, paragraphic eq for example). - Add some tutorials! Some things might not be straightforward like using Shift + [keys] for shortcuts etc. - Easier recording mode (like the ability to open a new empty audio project) - Multitrack mode, for more channels! - play a bit more with the concept of having different windows that can be in different screens (check out the frequency analyzer under "view") To answer a few questions, I plan to have a very open license this is just a fun side project for me. but I need to figure out the licenses of some libs I am using first (eg wavesurfer, lzma-wasm) and do proper attribution! Thanks again! PS. I wrote this in 2018, and just kept it on my hard disk until recently, so certain features might be slightly different than back then :)

chpmrc 6y ago
This is one of the coolest web apps I've ever seen. How it handles multiple windows, docking, local drafts. Wow, well done!
Tade0 6y ago
The next plans are - redo drawing library to further improve performance! I'm amazed that you still have ideas regarding improvements here, because at least the selection performance is buttery-smooth even on a phone. Great job, very useful product.
- BubRoss 6y ago
  Soundforge on a 486 100Mhz was already pretty fast at editing a single track of audio. It's amazing how much heavy frameworks have warped our perception of normal interactivity.
  - Tade0 6y ago
    I had a 486 and did some rudimentary audio editing back then. I remember the performance to be decent, but not 60fps-decent. But aside from that phones usually have relatively infrequent touch updates, which usually results in a single repaint on every such event, so 10FPS or so.

pea 6y ago

Awesome - kind of reminds me of the Renoise interface!

gtm1260 6y ago

I open Audacity about once every 3 months for some random audio editing, this is definitely a better/more intuitive app. Plus web based is awesome for something I use so infrequently. Great Work!

svth 6y ago
Don't knock Audacity, though. Fantastically useful piece of software.

ctrager 6y ago

Please forgive me for being self-centered. I DO think AudioMass is great. I'm running it locally and I even contributed by posting a legit issue in github. But here's the self-centered part: The other day I posted a "Show HN" for something web audio related that I wrote and got crickets so I'd like to try again: https://ctrager.github.io/music_tools https://ctrager.github.io/music_tools. Especially check out "Pitch Detector". All three tools are standalone single HTML files that don't need a server.

ximeng 6y ago
These are interesting tools. Pitch detector didn't seem to work too well for me but no doubt my bad singing. You could probably just show both clefs with the relevant clef symbol at the beginning rather than making it an option. For the beat detector, it would be interesting to see average distance from the beat in order to try to improve. It could be a game following a rhythm easily. Think for HN you probably need a quick demo that will attract more of the large number of people who are not necessarily going to use this tool long term. Give people a hook. Also keep trying, because it's pretty random what gets voted up on any one day. I think with some development and innovation this could be a useful tool. You've also not got any contact info which makes it harder for interested people to get in touch if they like your stuff.
- ctrager 6y ago
  I can't really make it work with singing either, but it works well when I play violin. My motivation is just pitch, to give feedback to me playing violin or my wife trying to learn viola.
  - Cactus2018 6y ago
    Check out "Intonia", works brilliantly with stringed instruments
    - ctrager 6y ago
      I had tried it briefly because my favorite youtube violin teacher Beth Blackerby recommended it in one of her videos, and it's great. But, I wanted the experience of coding something myself (I'm retired, hadn't coded in four years, lockdown has made me antsy) and I wanted something that was a standalone single HTML file, and I wanted something that felt easier. So, I ignore the time dimension and paint the notes on the staff the way a player is used to reading them rather than Intonia's interface which looks more technical.

kpmah 6y ago

Very nice! I've recently tried covering some similar ground for a side project (https://forkjam.com/new https://forkjam.com/new) so I have an idea of how much work this is. I take it you took the approach of using WASM for audio decoders?

01walid 6y ago

For a second I thought this is a WebAssembly app :) Nice job!

PdTheTech 6y ago

This is awesome. As an avid past user of Cool Edit 2000 and Adobe Edition 1.5, I love this project. Fantastic to see something familiar in a browser. As a bonus it hits me right in the nostalgia. I'll be watching and supporting this!

kube-system 6y ago

When I try to play the sample in Brave I only get sound for a couple of seconds before it goes quiet. In FF it works correctly.

kevindeasis 6y ago

It took me a few seconds on how to use this, but once I figured it out, I was like, damn, this is pretty cool! I wish there was a cli for this

jjice 6y ago

We have Photopea (https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/) for images, and now we have AudioMass for audio. I love these open source, web based tools that work fantastic. Great job!

detaro 6y ago
Wait, Photopea is open source?!
- edoceo 6y ago
  https://github.com/photopea/photopea https://github.com/photopea/photopea
  - detaro 6y ago
    That's a repo with a Readme and 4 image files for the logo...
    - djsumdog 6y ago
      Yes, and it clearly says it's not open source in the README: > Since Photopea is not fully open-source, this account serves as a place for bug reports and general discussion.
    - edoceo 6y ago
      Yep, that's what I was showing. It's got a GitHub but it's not FOSS
      - kupopuffs 6y ago
        Just a link is not really showing. Everyone knows nobody clicks on the links, we demand instant explanations!
- ehsankia 6y ago
  It's not, though the author [0] posts here from time to time and it's still free software. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=IvanK_net https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=IvanK_net

city41 6y ago

It appears the entire app was written with vanilla JS. That's just an observation. I wouldn't have expected that nowadays. The app is super impressive!

jacquesm 6y ago
That's a huge plus in my book. Frameworks tend to obscure what the application actually does because there is orders of magnitude more framework code than there is application code, and frameworks tend to be very indirect when going about their business with 12 different layers hit for a simple operation.
- city41 6y ago
  As a counter, if you look at the code, there's a lot of DOM api calls littered throughout which obscure what is going on. This could be relieved by pulling out the DOM manipulation into common constructs that all parts of the app use, but then you're creating your own framework/library and might be better off using a battle tested one.
  - lucideer 6y ago
    Given how responsive the UI is compared to most modern UIs built in the "battle tested" frameworks & libraries, I suspect the recommendations in this comment are all well and good in theory, but not necessarily reflective of reality in practice.
goldforever 6y ago
Noticed that too!

thinkloop 6y ago

These are the exact tools I am constantly looking for. Full browser sandbox for no stress "install", local-first, offline-first, so you own your own data - then option for locally encrypted cloud backups. I am almost 100% web now, I use very few installed programs and am constantly trying to get that to zero. One day someone is going to collect all these best-in-class web tools and make a proper chromebook where the user owns their own data.

andai 6y ago

This is really cool, thanks for sharing! I'm noticed my CPU fan at full blast and checked my processes (then Chrome task manager), I had left it open an it was using 80-95% CPU in the background. Tested again, it seems to be the spectrum analyzer (even after I pause playback, or close the analyzer window).

deeblering4 6y ago

This us great! Kinda reminds me of cool edit pro (two point oooooh)

ubercow13 6y ago

Does this load the whole file into memory while it's being worked on? What if you tried to load a file that is too big? I wonder with these more complex productivity web-apps becoming more common, how something like a video editor might work that needs to work on data too large to put in memory.

pantelisk 6y ago
Yes, it is all in memory. I am taking advantage for IndexDB for local drafts. And localstorage for plugin presets. But it does not match the flexibility of being able to create lots of big uncompressed files and cache in the disk while workign on a project. So everything needs to use lower fidelity settings, or do things like compress WAV files in a lossless way with LZMA since other avenues are too heavy. I am not seeing this becoming something like Audacity or Audition replacement, but a quick tool for modifying audio files on the fly.

croisillon 6y ago

May I ask, what the sample music is? Sounds like a movie score but Shazam doesn't recognizes it.

pantelisk 6y ago
Haha, it's something I wrote a long time ago (around 10 years back). I wrote it in Cubase and if I recall correctly Symphobia was the primary VST used. I had way more time back then for music than I do now. If you like the piece feel free to grab it (test.mp3 in the github repo). Cheers!
- croisillon 6y ago
  Thanks! It's a bummer though: it sounds like a movie I'd like to watch :D

inflam52 6y ago

Great work!!! I've been wanting to do something like this for a while. I'm glad someone is leveraging the web to build a real open source DAW!

waprin 6y ago

Really great project, nice job author, hoping to use it as a starting point/inspiration for some projects of my own.

jacquesm 6y ago

This is smack in the path of Audacity, very nice work. Is it possible to load midi synchronized to an audio file? That's a weak point in Audacity, it can't really edit the midi as you go through the audio and for some tasks that would be extremely useful to have.

dsco 6y ago

Now slap cloud storage, collaborative editing/highlighting and paid accounts on it - this is impressive software!

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Soundcloud meets Github!

anigbrowl 6y ago

8/10, very promising. feels like Cooledit/Audition, which was for a long time the best of its class (Pro T Tools is the industry standard but that's based on long years of hardware-lock-in). Allow local instances and add Lua or similar user scripting and you've got a winner. Well done.

pantelisk 6y ago

Author again here! Now that this is finally sunsetting, I feel a bit more comfortable writing some things I 've learnt today! - First of all, I am amazed at the suggestions and love this is getting. I have been dog fooding it by using it to quickly edit foley audio from a tascam hand-microphone device, in order to make some cheap sound effects for a game project I am working on. The point is, I thought I was aware of all bugs, and all areas of improvement, and I am humbled to have my mind opened and see how valuable outside perspectives are! It's so easy get tunnel vision and think you know best I guess. - Secondly... as I said I wrote this in June 2018, and just... kept it... I guess I was afraid of sharing it to the world, perhaps the audio people would get mad at me for making mistakes with the audio api (like the fade in/fade out being linear). Perhaps the javascript people would make fun of me for just using Vanilla JS. But if this is impressive in 2020, imagine how impressive it would have been back in 2018! So I guess my point is. Share your work! Do not be afraid to put it out there! - If anyone is interested on how it is built, and how the interface complexities are managed, even though it is just plain old school JS that has the reputation of being notoriously difficult to maintain, I would be happy to make a write-up shortly, or perhaps give a talk on it. - Third... (hopefully that is ok). If you like AudioMass, and like the way it is built and it performs, perhaps you might enjoy working together with me. We are doing cutting edge computer vision, and well.. some CRUD stuff too! My company is hiring (info in my profile). But please be advised that due to covid-19 things may take longer or may not be fully up to date. PS. As for license, I will probably choose something like "wtfpl.net". if it can help you learn something, or build something, go ahead! If you noticed, the page doesn't have any tracking (I realy don't know how many visitors came (I also disabled nginx logs)). And of course no ads at all. I 'm just trying to build cool and useful stuff!

sam1r 6y ago
This is great! I’d love to help contribute. Would you be interested in adding flac support? Imagine the future interface with flac + svg + you’re already well-performant foundation with audio mass
- pantelisk 6y ago
  Yes! Flac support is important, thank you for the suggestion. I would expect it to be already supported https://caniuse.com/#search=flac https://caniuse.com/#search=flac and I am just using web audio functions it should decode fine (but it's not). Maybe I am overzealously filtering for formats! And performance is fine, but it can be so but soooo much better! Like just by adding sprinkling some wasm or asmjs in the "onaudioprocess" loops, to speed up the buffer traversing loops and escape the dreaded garbage collector!

kennyangel 6y ago

nice work

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago

I dabble from time to time with mixin rekids, and am presently trying to find an audio editor for simple cut n paste that Audacity. Must support MacOS. What's is out there? My DuckFu is letting me down in this instance. I'll give AudioMass a spin over the weekend, and like others have said if it could be a standalone Electron-based app that would probably work, and happy to throw a few antipodean dineros at it.

false_kermit 6y ago

Very cool! I tried doing some signal processing stuff back in the day and got absolutely discouraged after discovering how much linear algebra was involved. I particularly appreciate the ability to preview compression. Compression is probably what I use most when I'm editing audio and having that at my fingertips without loading Audacity or Ableton would be super nice for quick, rough changes. One thing that I'd really like to see would be a de-essing plugin, or even better a multiband compressor.

dharma1 6y ago

nice, was just looking for a free audio editor and could only find things that look like they're from the 90's (Audacity). .wav export would be grand!

xchip 6y ago

thanks!

suyash 6y ago

Good job, like to see some good tutorials.

dharma1 6y ago

Would be great if there was a VST like standard for audio effect plugins for web, so that many web-based audio apps could use the same plugins. Saw something like that but for synths - https://www.webaudiomodules.org/wamsynths/ https://www.webaudiomodules.org/wamsynths/

pantelisk 6y ago
That's insane! I 'm actually working on a lite-daw for web, so this is extremely interesting to me. However I do not plan to go very far. My angle is that this should be a tool to experiment and try out things with minimal friction, then for any serious work, perhaps users can look into professional solutions. Perhaps also take advantage of the web's collaborative nature and have multiple users share a session! There are decades of research, feedback loops and work put into tools such as FruityLoops, Cubase, ProTools etc, and the thought of reimplementing parts of it for web is such a daunting task.
- dharma1 6y ago
  Multiplayer would be sweet for a web DAW, it rocks in design tools like Figma. I think you are right, a light DAW would cover 80% of people's needs. And as long as you can export the track as midi and audio bounces, you could always continue it in a native DAW. I would love to collab if you need UI/UX for this btw? I've worked on audio and DAW stuff for a long time, as well as open source. What's the best way to reach?

12bits 6y ago

This looks really cool, by the nature of my user name I must greedily request vintage sampler modes. :)

wigl 6y ago

I would love the ability to label and extract sections like in audacity! That’s the only thing missing from my use case

pantelisk 6y ago
You can extract sections (as mp3 by selecting, and then File > Extract mp3 > current selection). Or File > Save Local Draft (and you can open the selection as a standalone audio project). Being able to label things with markers and different colors though would be fantastic! It's in the plans, once a bit better audio handling of slices (eg cross-fading, mix-dragging etc) is added!
- wigl 6y ago
  I noticed that and I do think it is nice. I have to extract and transcribe long sequences, so it would be nice to have the audacity label track feature to bookmark/label a bunch of sections and then output them as individual files named by their label along with a .txt. This is audacity's format: start end label_name 1.02302 2.23193 label_1 You could take it further and have some numeric labeling (audacity doesn't autofill) and that'd be even nicer. This would be super helpful for working with speech processing data. Regardless, keep up the good work!

aswanson 6y ago

The UI is cool looking.

bulldog13 6y ago

How do I delete a highlighted section? I feel like I am missing something simple.