I realize this probably isn't what the OP was aiming for, but I think a web-based DAW would be wonderful for artists collaborating over the internet.

I am currently recording an album with my band and we all have have monitoring equipment and recording interfaces at home (save for the drummer for obvious reasons) and currently we just bounce a Reaper project between each other so we can all add our respective tracks.

It's far from ideal. We don't all run the same OS. We don't all use the same commercial plugins. Result is that nobody gets the same audio out of it and sometimes the project gets mangled (eg the Linux port can't load some resources because they point towards `C:\Users\JohnDoe\Album` or something). Also, the folders get huge very fast.

A web-native DAW would solve a lot of these problems, assuming realtime audio is possible. I know that, for instance, with Pipewire or JACK/PulseAudio, you could probably pull it off, but I have no idea how it would work on Windows' audio stack which appears to be made of pixie dust.

I'm hoping the VST format dies a painful death, personally. It's a non-portable legacy solution and even in the best of cases it's a pain to work with.

I don't think you can really squeeze out enough performance out of web browser for a full-fledged DAW.

One of my complete song can push even my Intel i9 to its knees on desktop. You're talking about dozens of MIDI tracks, dozens of audio tracks, several plugins...that requires heavy duty performance.

What about the performance being backed by a beefy server machine, and web just being the (potentially collaborative) front-end for it?

Everyone works with the exact same environment. Accessible from any machine. The only concern is latency, and that will be a hard one to solve. But once it is solved, it could imo become the next big step forward for DAWs that completely changes the game.

Latency would be a huge problem. Anything over 30ms results in your timing being slightly off. Go above 60ms and recording audio becomes impossible.

On my desktop with Ryzen 5700x, 32GB Ram and a dedicated audio interface, I still get 11ms I/O latency (22ms combined) in Ableton. If I had to send this signal through a web browser to a server, I can’t see any scenario where I could keep this under 30ms. Beyond 30ms, the lag becomes noticeable.

It can work if you’re only working with MIDI tracks but any audio work requires absolutely the lowest possible latency

It really depends on what you mean by "enough". If the native audio stack does the real heavy lifting, and the plugins are compiled to WASM, it'd probably be more than enough for most use cases. People were mixing digitally decades ago on much much slower machines than yours.

Agreed! Around the time the lockdown happened my band discovered bandlab.com, another online DAW. The lag/performance is a little slow to do serious recording (though you can get by by making an audio recording and manually shifting it a few ms in the interface), but it's a fantastic way to share songs/ideas back and forth. Often what some of us do is record tracks in our own local DAWS and upload the track wavs to bandlab. At the very least it allows us to:

- mute tracks easily, change volume on parts

- add tracks where we can upload alternate/extra parts

- visualize the structural flow of a song

- general cut/splice play around :)

the company that makes bandlab also makes a desktop DAW called cakewalk. It seems to have a nice feature where you can sync it with bandlab, which would be killer. It's windows only so I've been unable to try it out though

Ableton does allow you to easily export sessions, and freeze tracks that have custom plugins. Their stock plugins are now good enough that they can rival commercial ones for many use cases (which is often good enough to the track to the final mixing stages).

Definitely agree re: VST format - PC/Mac/Linux fragmentation is annoying, old plugins often can't even be loaded, and sharing presets is a pain.

I just don't think an audio plugin should be able to bring down the entire host application due to bad memory management.

Bitwig actually has this figured out: all audio stuff is already its own separate separate process and you can even further isolate plugins to separate processes.

Probably they key reason why they get to support X86 plugins on M1.

That's extremely interesting. When a plugin crashes, what happens to the rest of the signal chain?

The track goes quiet, other tracks keep working. I suppose if the track has other ways to make sound (e.g. the plugin is just one of the many instruments it's playing) then it's just that part of the processing graph, but I haven't tried experimenting with that so deeply.

You need to restart the plugin manually.

Checkout audio movers!

https://audiomovers.com/wp/

Firefox' audio backend, cubeb supports Jack, CoreAudio and WASAPI output, so low latency and multi-channel playback is not completely out of reach.

Locked down school computer users

Chromebook users

On-the-go users

Teachers where students have their own computers

I bet there's more

The platform is really about uploading strictly annotated loops and stems to the server and have them exposed via an API. The DAW thing your looking at is really just away to preview the content. So I'm trying to see how far I can push it.

That seems like a really cool idea, and I'd be curious to see how far it can go.

I'm sure you aren't aiming your project at, like, totally upending the record publishing industry. But it would be cool if someday artists could upload snippets, mix them together, publish the result for sale on a site. And somehow have it sort out the contributors so that royalties can be trickled down elegantly so that, like, the internet-equivalent of a session artist gets a fair cut.

Uh... not to set the bar too high or anything. Good luck!

Yeah latency and timing seems like the killer, it's practically hard to imagine a worse possible environment for this.

Especially, btw, with the Spectre/meltdown mitigations that coarsen the browser's clock resolution/etc.