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Show HN: Audiomass – a free, open-source multitrack audio editor for the web
- m0nit0r 5mo agoLooks promisimg. Must try the next days.
- HuzaifaYasin 5mo agoHow can we add more tracks. is there a limit?
- pantelisk 5mo agoThere is a little [ + ] button next to CHANNELS in the sidebar, it has no limit but right now so add as many as you like :) It's using dom to render the multitrack waveform boxes currently so I would assume after a certain point it might start to slow down a bit. In the future might switch it all to be webgpu based to avoid such limits.
- macwhisperer 5mo agothis is cool thanks for making it!
- serious_angel 5mo agoIt seems like the inspiration went from Audacity, and with great changes to the design and feel of calmness and solidity! I've tried loading a file with XM format, yet the current state of the import logic stated "Unsupported". Is there any chance you'll support the format? For example, the following artwork is radiating charmingly in VLC: - https://cable.ayra.ch/modplayer/mods/!Others/DYNAMITE_-_Winamp_5.0RC8_crk.xm And, thank you! very much for the experiments, effort, miracles... art you do...
- pantelisk 5mo agoThank you :) I 'll look into it, I am a little cautious of bloating up the filesize (right now it's at 98kb of js and 10kb of css), but if I can make something work efficiently I 'll give it a go. On an unrelated note, I'm a little surprised there is no good open source web audio tracker (like Renoise but for the web) out there yet...
- dspillett 5mo agoFor that much functionality 98kb is hardly bloated at all by modern standards, impressively slight in fact, it could probably cope with some more. Unless part of your fun is keeping it so very trim, of course!
- pantelisk 5mo agoYes, it's part of the fun. Original version was 65kb (with just the single editor mode and all the filters, mp3/wav export etc). But then having to add flac codec, tempo estimators and finally the multitrack mode, made it closer to 100. When I started developing I was a little frustrated with how bloated the web felt back then so I took that direction, it's much better today though and it's no longer an issue, but I still find it fun to impose these constraints and try to work within or around them (there's this fascinating concept of constrained creativity)
- jamwise 5mo agoI appreciate the attention to efficiency and avoiding bloat. As a frequent audacity user I'm thinking I might end up using this for a lot of simpler tasks. That said the web offers such great techniques to maintain this. Passive loading of plugins for example could keep things snappy and light and load things when you need them. If you want the perspective of a prospective long term user: I'd be very comfortable using your app even at tens of megabytes. You could probably keep your initial load pretty light but pull in larger modules as needed. There are certain effects and audio layering I often use in Audacity that would keep me there, but your modern interface and browser access are huge selling points. If your vision includes moving to a bigger editor I guarantee you you'll find a huge base who wouldn't even notice megabytes of code.
- pantelisk 5mo agoAll very good points, not much to say I agree with you. With loading plugins on demand it could grow in size without affecting load and experience (and since offline mode is a separate link that would still be fine to be a little larger since it's fetching the app locally).
- genericacct 5mo agoVery nice. One feature id like to see is import of stem bundles as produced by various tools like suno or stemsplitter
- sgallant 5mo agoThis is great. I need to do audio work this coming week and was dreading Audacity.
- throawayonthe 5mo agowhen have you last tried audacity? it's been getting friendlier
- amelius 5mo agoHow much work would it be to compile Audacity for the web? (I'm a bit behind on web technologies nowadays)
- patwie 5mo agoHas been done https://wavacity.com/ https://wavacity.com/
- Forgeties79 5mo agoAgreed but it’s still not a proper DAW and suffers from those limitations. It gets very rickety when you go beyond a basic stereo mix.
- rhizome 5mo agoAudacity isn't trying to be "a proper DAW," it's OK to be just be an audio editor.
- Kaliboy 5mo agoHave you tried Ardour? It's like a superset of Audacity.
- timc3 5mo agoTry Ocenaudio - I’ve used pretty much every audio editor free and paid for and this is my go to for a free editor. I also cannot understand why anyone would recommend Audacity.
- ugh123 5mo agoIs there midi support and vst support? I know that's asking for a lot =)
- RobotToaster 5mo agoDoesn't seem to support midi currently unfortunately. I was hoping for the same.
- argimenes 5mo agoMakes me think of Quatermass ...
- algoth1 5mo agoGetting the 2002 Cool Edit Pro 2.0 vibes!
- yesbut 5mo agowhat is the theoretical file size / project size limit? what happens when the browser crashes?
- pantelisk 5mo agoI usually use it to edit audio tracks quickly up to 10 minutes long, though I have received nice emails from people who have used for 1hr+ podcasts successfully (though certain heavy operations wouldn't be very fun to use). For multitrack sessions, there is the ability to export to a .amss file that contains all the settings, markers, tracks etc. For single track edit... it would just crash right now. There is already a feature for caching audio tracks in indexeddb (it's under >File), but honestly it's not a web api I have found to be super reliable. I don't blame the browser developers, because I 'm sure if it was more reliable certain websites would put it to use storing gigabytes of trackers on the user's machine :). For this reason, I haven't made it auto-save the session automatically yet, trying to be a good citizen on the user's computer, maybe that will change in the future if there's a strong need for it. Also, right now there is no backend, once it loads there are no more requests made to the server, so it's bound to frontend limitations. This is by design, I want it to be an app that respects users, doesn't upload or leak information, no ads, etc, even if it means getting a small hit in functionality in other areas. I think of it like photopea/pixlr are to photoshop. Quick and easy to use, get you at 90% of the way. If somebody wants to do a serious operation, then by all means go for a paid desktop pro-daw solution :) edit: reason
- em-bee 5mo agoi managed to load a 12 hour book. it took some time to load, but once loaded the UI remained snappy, so i guess it is usable. the only problem is that the waveform does not scale when i zoom in.
- pantelisk 5mo agoOh, that's fantastic to know. Did you load it into multitrack, or the regular editor? (in multitrack it does not scale currently, but working on it). On regular editor it should in theory try to zoom. There is a pyramid cache mechanism for long files, basically it tries to optimize with simple heuristics how many peak-lines to show for every zoom level. The renderer is pretty dumb right now - just old-school 2d canvas "ctx.lineTo" calls - no gpu, so enormous files can really make it slow, this is the reason for the drops (to ease load). So it might be dropping way too many samples in this case and then not switching properly to the next cache level because the zoom to duration/length ratio is enormous. I 'll look into it. Thanks again
- ZeWaka 5mo agoNot sure why you remove the tooltips from deactivated buttons
- JKCalhoun 5mo agoSo want something like this but where the tracks are in the cloud. I want to "check out" someone's drum loop and add a guitar riff. Check it into a branch. Someone else checks out the drum+guitar, adds a bass line. Checks in. "Jamming" with other people is one of the most fun things. To the degree that you can "get close" on the web… RiffHub, anyone?
- sporkl 5mo agoI think that's what Soloist[1] is trying to do (unaffiliated, but I've met the founder) [1]: https://www.soloistapp.com/ https://www.soloistapp.com/
- someguyiguess 5mo agoThat doesn’t look similar at all. That looks like an app for making loops on your phone.
- someguyiguess 5mo agoYes. I’ve wanted something like this for a while. I’ve always wondered why there isn’t version control for DAWs. So many times I’ve spent hours editing a track and accidentally saved it without specifying a unique file name. Only to open it later and wish I could go back to before the changes that fucked it up.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5mo agoThe good version controls used for code & text are line-oriented; most DAW session file formats are semantically scoped, and so the VC tools won't work well. Most DAWs allow you to "snapshot" a session at any time, and return to it as you want to. Certainly Ardour does that.
- empressplay 5mo agoLogic Pro allows you to revert to previous saves / auto-saves.
- 5mo ago
- vandyswa 5mo agoWhat's a waveform box and how does one select it?
- pantelisk 5mo agoIt's the audio track in a channel. A channel is the horizontal strip, a waveform box is a piece of audio somewhere across that strip. You can double click on one to enter single editor mode, or single click to make it active (once it's active you can drag it around, apply effects to it, move it on a different channel etc etc). Sorry still working on improving the UX :) EDIT: There's a short video here - https://x.com/pkalogiros/status/2053492761350046032 https://x.com/pkalogiros/status/2053492761350046032
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- sam1r 5mo agoSignificant props for accepting .flac files out of the bat. Incredible work.
- kirbysayshi 5mo agolooks at code, sees safety closures, function assignments, sequential var declaration Ahh I see you are one of the old ways, of the lost knowledge :) I am very nostalgic for this style of development, even though I do not miss it in a team setting at all! Super cool app you’ve made!
- fagnerbrack 5mo agoLet's make it modern again, just write a blog post on <famous-company> tech blog
- hnuser 5mo agolooks vibe coded
- pantelisk 5mo ago> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23337091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23337091
- coldcity_again 5mo agoStrongly disagree. Looks coded with love and fingers.
- jdw64 5mo agoCool!!
- djfobbz 5mo agoThis is a very impressive undertaking. Great job!!!
- keithluu 5mo agoAwesome tool. Is this the a new version? I used this few weeks ago and it looked a bit different.
- shuaibird 5mo agoLooks cool. It feels like an early web-based Logic Pro-style editor.
- cocodill 5mo agoIt feels like cool edit pro 2 before it was turned to shit by adobe. Your app has a pretty good and intuitive UX. And that's the most important thing in an audio editor.
- coldcity_again 5mo agoAhh THAT's what it was reminding me of. Thanks! CEP2 was great indeed.
- gunapologist99 5mo agoIs this open source? No license.
- boje 5mo agoI'm surprised no one has noticed this yet.
- pantelisk 5mo agoAuthor here. License is pretty much do whatever you want with it (free as in free information and free beer), I suppose the closest one to that would be MIT, but I don't like its serious legalese tone. I prefer the whimsical "free as in..." phrase
- ranger_danger 5mo agoI would say CC0 or just plain "Public Domain" would be even simpler than MIT, since there's no requirement to show the license text to anyone or to have a copyright text.
- boje 5mo agoDigging further, this has been shown before in 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23337091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23337091 The author mentions in the thread that he eventually plans to have a proper license for it and needs to figure out the licensing of some of the dependencies, but that was six years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23338538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23338538 This is not directed at the quality of the project itself, however, which seems to be good.
- subhashp 5mo agoSuper Amazing!
- candizdar 5mo ago[flagged]
- andrew_kwak 5mo agoTried it out for a bit. Really smooth for a web app, especially with multitrack editing. Do you know if it can handle MIDI files too, or just audio?
- sailingcode 5mo agoImpressive, congratulations for the nice work.
- guangboshushu 5mo ago[dead]
- pantelisk 5mo agoHey HN. Thanks again for featuring this project :) this is my favorite community on the internet and my go to site to visit, almost by reflex, when I have idle time, so it feels me with joy to have made something well received here. I 'll be heading off soon, so decided to write some features included in this release that might not be apparent right away (still working on improving the UX). - Drag n drop multiple audio files into multitrack = multiple channels automatically created - Double click on a waveform box in multitrack, opens it in the original audio editor (for more precise editing) - Copying (command+c, or shift+c) works between multitrack and regular editor. So for example, you can open a file in original editor tweak it, and then copy all or part of it and paste it in multitrack in a specific channel. - Most effects have already pre-made presets to make them easier to use - You can make your own effect presets by clicking the 3 dots after having made a modification in an effect (stored in localstorage) - Zero crossing selection is under "Edit" - There is a tempo tools section in View. You can automatically detect tempo of a track, tap to guess a tempo and play with metronome - There is also an id3 tag viewer (for mp3 files) there as well - You can right click or press M to add markers (makes it easier to highlight sections of a track, especially when working with longer audio tracks) - Seamless Loop tool (under Edit): crossfade preview, silence trim, repeat loop, open loop in a new editor tab. - Offline/PWA support: Help > store offline version, will open a new page that will trigger a service worker that will make the site work offline as well. - Session export as .amss file for multitrack. If you aren't done working on a session you can export all of its audiofiles and configuration in an LZMA compressed container file (will still be pretty big though). For single audio mode, mp3/wav/flac export is available. - Pressing X in multitrack when 2 waveform boxes overlap, makes them crossfade smoothly (denoted by an "XF" label at the top right - undocumented behavior but can be quite useful, will keep improving it) - You can open the menu by pressing the ~ key and then navigate it with arrow keys (left/right for sections, bottom up for selections, enter to trigger an action and esc to close) for a tiny bump in speed of getting things done. Similarly the time controls are clickable and open a mini menu where a time can be specified to jump quickly to it (arrow keys to go between minutes/s/ms) And finally my favorite feature of them all (though not a new one per se), - In "View" select "Frequency analyzer" or "Multitrack mixer" and then press the dock button. Audiomass supports the ability to extract elements of it into new pop up windows. So you could have parts of the application on a different monitor keeping the main app in the main tab. It's a very old trick, but I find it kinda cool :) Thanks again and hope you enjoyed the sample music! (edit: formatting)
- GhostGains 5mo ago[flagged]
- ammar_x 5mo agoThis looks great for quick audio operations without the need to use heavy apps. One question: I tried the "Fade In" effect; is there a way to control its timing (i.e. the part of the clip where the effect is applied) ?
- pantelisk 5mo agoyou can click and drag to select part of the audio (and then drag the edges of the selection region that has appeared if you want to adjust it), and then apply the effect. All effects prioritize the current selection first, and if no selection is present then get applied on the entire track.
- codingconstable 5mo agowell done you!
- codingconstable 5mo agoWell done you!
- hbwang2076 5mo ago[flagged]
- conradfr 5mo agoCool work, the weird part is effects being item based instead of track based and that selecting an effect stops the playing and you apply it blind.
- embirdating 5mo ago[dead]
- coldcity_again 5mo agoGreat to see how far this has come on. Brilliant work!
- TheCipster 5mo agoVery cool! Congrats OP. How would you compare it to OpenDAW? https://opendaw.org https://opendaw.org
- pantelisk 5mo agoOpenDAW is different beast in the same field. It's a full music editor and suite, where you can write notes down on a piano roll (or record with midi), then use synthesizers and samples to turn that into a song. Audiomass is an audio editor, meaning that it works with already existing files that might need to be cut, edited, cleaned, or filtered, or in case where one has multiple stems put together to be mixed. Think of it a bit like vector vs pixel editing. OpenDAW is vectors (music info), audiomass is pixels (music data)
- nocodeg 5mo agoBrilliant project and great execution. Well done!
- epicsagas 5mo agoThe PWA/offline mode is underrated. Just stored it locally and now I have a full audio editor that works without internet, lives in a tab, and doesn't ask me to update. This is what the web platform was supposed to feel like.
- the_arun 5mo agoI need an Audio tool to remaster old songs. Basically to bring old songs to modern crystal clear quality. I would be happy pay subscription fees. Is there a tool for that?
- enannnn 5mo agothis is coool
- Abhi0501 5mo agoReally cool project! Been looking for a browser-based audio editor. How does it handle large file sizes?
- pantelisk 5mo agoI just tried it with a 2 hour podcast file, since more people asked about long files. It is performs great on chrome on my pretty powerful macbook. Some operations are a little slow and zooming in to max level starts to be slow, default things like cut/paste, apply fade effect and volume controls to areas of the file feel ok.
- marc_g 5mo agoI was editing some audio last week and I just picked the first thing in Google that didn't look like shit and didn't try to take my first born child (which I don't even have), to use any feature of it. Turns out it was this! Thanks, it's been a pleasure using your tool and I'll definitely do it again!
- Asterism 5mo agoLooks awesome! Had some trouble using it though. I double clicked a sample and got stuck there. Nothing in the view menu or any way I could see to get back to the initial overview screen.
- pantelisk 5mo agooh to go back to multitrack, there is a button at the top right (multitrack beta). Maybe it feels abit disconnected being there
- MrClouds 5mo agoFrom an audio engineer: this is so freakin cool.
- miniBill 5mo agoThe included sample slaps :)
- kame_lift 5mo ago[flagged]
- jonasholmer 5mo agoHey, really awesome work! As someone that makes a lot of music and creates instruments and plugins, there's one thing though I feel need to push back against slightly. So now you're in the position where I'm assuming the codebase is quite young an malleable. I think it's worth asking yourself: do we need another garageband-like linear music tool? I would say, no. The reason I'm bringing this up in first place is because, yes, there will always be people that think you should make another... superhero-movie or something. But why not make an effort to make something instead that genuinely introduces some new ideas?
- standbyme 5mo agowow impressive
- spospider 5mo agoVery cool! I can see myself using this for quick edits
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]