Wavepot

Wavepot describes itself as a digital audio workstation, but it’s really more of a flexible live-coding environment. It’s very slickly implemented with a number of bundled examples, with the developers requesting donations to help them build more. The code is closed source, but I assume, like CoffeeCollider featured in the last issue, that the generated samples are buffered into a scriptProcessorNode for playback. The Web Audio API provides many native nodes which are more efficient and achieve lower latency, and it would be interesting to see in the future if some of these live coding environments decide to take advantage of them.

Web Audio Editor in Firefox

We saw some sneaky previews of the new developer tools for Web Audio in previous issues of this newsletter, but Jordan Santell, developer of the tools on the Mozilla team, has now written up some more details over on their blog. The tools are already very useful and a lot of fun to play with, so its worth installing the FF32 preview to try them out.

Faust announces Web Audio support

Faust is a functional programming language explicitly designed for implementing signal processing and audio applications. It is designed to allow signal processors to be described in notation that is as close to the underlying mathematics as possible. Faust is a compiled language, and with the latest release the Faust team have announced support for Web Audio as a compile target. The Faust compiler first generates asm.js code, which is a subset of JavaScript that can be optimised efficiently by many JavaScript engines. This code is then wrapped in a Web Audio scriptProcessorNode, where it can then be connected to the rest of a Web Audio graph. This opens up exciting possibilities for educational applications with Faust, and plug-in development.

Making Music Mobile with the Web (Google I/O)

A great presentation from Google I/O on the Web Audio API and how it inter-connects with other emerging technologies, WebRTC and getUserMedia, from the developers of Soundtrap (who I featured back in issue 4).

Interactive timeline of synthesis

A very Web 1.0 timeline of the history of synthesis over on the Bob Moog foundation website, nevertheless packed full of interesting photos and anecdotes. Note: the history of synthesis seems to stop with the Minimoog in 1970!