Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmjaa | Hacker News Reader

Nice. The only thing I don't like about it is that its browser based, because - as a musician with a room full of hardware - its hard to get over the conclusion that browser-based music tools are simply not ready for production - i.e. I would never use this on stage or in the studio. Cute experiment though...

View on HN

I understand your point of view, although there are people I know who managed to run Web Audio API plugins as VSTs :)

This particular app is meant more as a playground / sketch / sharing tool for DSP techniques, and imho it makes sense for it to be on the most immediately accessible platform, the Web.

However, it's possible to add Faust or C support to it in the future (using WebAssembly), a feature which will allow exporting your snippets directly to executable / VST.

I think this is a good way to look at it. It reminds me of shadertoy except for dsp audio.

It could be compiled with a webassembly backend and loaded, but... you could almost copy/paste the process() js function into c++ and it would compile, almost.

> run Web Audio API plugins as VSTs

Nice, I have thought about this before! Got a link?

I don't have a public link to the method they used, but I heard of this technique on the Web Audio Slack channel, which you can join here: https://web-audio.slack.com/. Basically, as I understood it, they found a way to wrap the Chrome runtime in a VST plugin and load it in a DAW. I guess the process can be optimised, but I'm no browser internals expert. The community is quite friendly, so if you're interested you could join it and ask, I'm sure they'll be happy to share with you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com