micbuffa's comments

Well, native vs Web, we already has this conversation about Word vs Google Docs ans now even Word is a web app built with web technologies, and can run in a browser. I'm part of the W3C WebAudio Working group, the core team that is making the WebAudio API at the heart of web apps that can do real time audio processing. Since 2011 we saw more and more impressive applications, and with ASM.js in 2015 and its successor, WASM in 2018, people started to port VST plugins, to compile very efficient DSP code written using some DSP like FAUST to WASM, etc. A Plugin format exists since 2015 (Web Audio Modules aka WAM), and some DAW that can record real time audio, support audio effects, instruments, etc. are now available. While they are not as feature complete as native DAWS, thousands of users record multitrack songs everyday and use many built in or external plugins. AmpedStudio can even use your native VSTs. I wrote some WAM plugins (guitar amp simulators) that are usable in AmpedStudio. It is possible to create very efficient WAM plugins in a minute using the FAUST IDE + some existing FAUST code (there are hundreds of examples on the IDE + on diverse open source GitHub Repos). You will find most effects, some instruments such as MOOG recreations etc.

Of course, the Web based DAWs and plugins are young, but some big actors like Roland (see https://roland50.studio/), Ableton (see https://learningsynths.ableton.com/), Propellerheads (they ported to the Web their VST synth Europa), Antares (the real autotune VST is available in the online DAW soundtrap.com).

Real time recording is operational without any hassle on Mac OS, and with some driver configs on Windows or Linux. You need to calibrate "latency compensation", that will automatically adjust the live recording audio to existing tracks.

Yes, online DAWs are close to GarageBand for example, in terms of features. But they also have some advantages : automatic sharing of projects, some DAWS even allow synchronous collaboration à la Google Docs, sharing a project is just sharing a link, and working together on the same project becomes really easy, no hassle for storing the audio files. Publication to spotify/deezer/youtube/apple Music is a click on a button. Most DAWS can be used for free. Etc. It's just the target user profile that is different: while Pro Tools/Logic/Ableton will target studios and pro users, these online DAWS are more for less exigent, more online connected people. Most projects are electronic music, etc.

I use Logic Audio, and I also use online DAWs. I heavily used ampedstudio during the covid lock down with remote friends... Then we roughly recorded / mixed some song projects, then I polished the final version by re-importing the tracks in LOGIC, but this was really for fine tuning things... AmpedStudio and soundtrap (I did not try bandlab) are very capable online DAWS.

We started writing a web-based DAW prototype that relies on the Webaudio Modules version 2.0 (a standard for plugins/hosts on the Web, that can be developed using a large variety of languages/approaches). For the moment, the DAW has very limited features but 1) Each track is written as an AudioWorklet, and sample accurate processing is being done for playing each track. That means, that from the processor part of each track player, we can schedule events (automation, midi, etc) to plugins. We can also loop and edit the audio track with a sample accuracy (this is not done yet, but everything is ready for that. We will add this soon). 2) Each track is associated with a plugin chain. Plugins are WAM plugins (webaudiomodules), and can be automated. 3) There are quite a lot of plugins already available in the WAM format, most effects, instruments. The WAM distribution comes with a set of example plugins + the FAUST IDE can generate WAM2 plugins in seconds. All running DSP in WASM. We (WAM designers, implementers and maintainers) can be reached on a slack channel (#webaudiomodules, subchannel of the #webaudio channel. Get incitation here: https://web-audio-slackin.herokuapp.com/

The WebAudioModules distro is 4 GitHub repos, it is also available as npm modules. (https://github.com/webaudiomodules, start by building the wam-example one and run the examples). You can find some presentations on youtube (such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G3we8dikq8).

DAW prototype (should be included soon in the wam-example repo): Picture : https://i.ibb.co/mBdNGqk/WAM2-DAW.jpg online version: https://wam-openstudio.vidalmazuy.fr/, current repo (work in progress, as I said, this work is active and we do plan to add all missing functionnalities the upcoming months) https://github.com/TER-M1/wam-openstudio

There are also professional, commercial DAWs, not open source ones, such as https://ampedstudio.com/ that is also capable of loading WAM plugins, and is developed using the same approach as our DAW proto (host as AW), bandlab.com or soundtrap.com.

Michel