Does anyone see multitrack recording happening well in-browser?

Has anyone tried BandLab? Aside from the social slop and recent aggressive advertising, their recording app is super impressive, glitch free, low latency, easy to use and sounds great.

Or will this always be the domain of installable software?

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jamesnorden 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Someone ported Audacity to the web. https://wavacity.com/

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ginko 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Serious question: Why would it be preferable to have something like this in the browser? The thought of having to keep track of a browser tab that you might accidentally close and lose all your work doesn't sound great.

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JKCalhoun 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I would like to see something like this in the Web simply to allow for collaboration.

I would love to see a DAW where randos upload just a track—maybe a drum track. Other's can "create a branch" where they jam along: add a bass track. And let the jamming, branching, songwriting commence.

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duped 2 days ago | parent [-]

Why does that require the web? Networked collaboration integration already exists in mainstream DAWs without all the downsides of forcing things into a web browser

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TheOtherHobbes 2 days ago | parent [-]

Everyone has a browser, not everyone has a DAW, and even fewer people have the same DAW.

Doing this in a browser is ridiculously inefficient.

But if you just want a limited-track scratchpad for virtual jamming, it's the most accessible option.

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PaulDavisThe1st 2 days ago | parent [-]

The bigger, broader problem is that "virtual jamming" just doesn't seem to have taken off the way some folks thought it would.

It's not a useless thing to be able to do, but there are few people who seem to want it at the center of their music-making activity. At least that is the way it seems to me. It initially appeared to be an immensely cool new capability, and in many ways it really is. It just isn't a thing that many people want to do.

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duped 2 days ago | parent [-]

I've seen a few products that are in essence, "virtual jamming" but they're not marketed like that. For example a bunch of live sound mixers come with an iOS app for live monitoring that you can use to feed monitor mixes straight to musicians' devices. Super useful if you have an iPad controlling Mainstage, a monitor mix, and sheet music. Another that's less obvious are live transcription/hearing assistance where you want to use your phone to tap into the output of the recording console's mix, or a translation/audio description mix.

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PaulDavisThe1st 2 days ago | parent [-]

That's a completely different concept from "virtual jamming", which requires moving audio back and forth over a WAN.

The sort of live sound mixers you're describing just send control signals between the pad and the mixer, no audio flows to or from the pad.

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duped 2 days ago | parent [-]

There are monitoring apps that do send audio to the device. I'm not talking about mix control apps. These are wireless replacements for dedicated monitor mixes that run over WiFi.

	▲	PaulDavisThe1st 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Right, but those are entirely different from the control protocols used between the pad and the mixer ... ... and it is still different from virtual jamming, which more or less definitionally requires a WAN. If you're all within wifi range of the mixer, you're actually jamming :)

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jmiskovic 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is easy to fix with local storage. You reopen the tab and you're right where you left it. Unfortunately the companies see it as an opportunity to lock users in with cloud saving.

The allure is that the web is the most open, most stable and the most cross-device platform we have. Almost anything that was made for web still works today, with Flash and Java applets being the two big exceptions. Following the Lindy effect the self-contained web apps of today will still be operational far into the future.

Contrast this with Android's pathetic record of constantly breaking backward compatibility and restricting what software the users can even run on their devices.

	▲	ginko 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		How is the web stable? Any server can change the app you're working on without you being able to do anything. Tons of the old web is broken or gone. Compare that to a win32 desktop app that will almost certainly keep working indefinitely without any changes. Plus you can use proper files for storage.

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mystifyingpoi 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I've never recorded with BandLab, but used it a lot for playback, and for a beginner, it's really good and very easy to use.

With regards to recording - I'm curious how this would work on a scale like 16 ins at a time. Dumping bits from the interface to disk as uncompressed .wav is trivial, on the browser I'm not sure how storage works. Would it have to upload to the cloud immediately?