Show HN: Collaborative live-coding MIDI sequencers in JavaScript

by tekstaron 1/12/23, 6:04 PMwith 1 comments
by tekstaron 1/12/23, 6:06 PM

Hey everyone,

I've been working on a collaborative audio, MIDI, and video editing web app for the past few years and I'm excited to show you what we’ve built so far.

Sequencer Party is a collaborative audio / midi / video web platform. It supports WebAudioModules 2 (WAM2), a third-party plugin format—like VST plugins but for the web.

The demo session linked in the post is running a live-coding Javascript MIDI sequencer plugin. Press the ‘code’ button on a plugin instance to edit the running Javascript. Hit ‘Run’ to run your code changes. If you log in, you can save your session or individual plugin presets and other users can load them into their sessions.

It’s collaborative like Google Docs. Sign up, invite people to your project, and you can edit the same session together in real-time. Without an account, you can run an offline copy, and it’s saved in your browser's local storage. When you’re in an online session, the code panel is also collaborative with everyone else in the session.

The post link goes to a public session you can clone into your own project if you sign up, but if you want to join a collaborative online session with me, here is a link to a project I made that we can hack on together:

https://sequencer.party/users/invite/1af84830884292fecb834fb...

We’ve got a lot more planned for 2023—more instruments, thousands of factory presets and sounds, run the video in a separate window for VJing or render the audio/video to a file.

Thanks for checking it out and let us know what you think! It works best on a computer (not phone) in Chrome and Firefox.

Tom https://sequencer.party

Reference Links:

A tutorial on coding with Function Sequencer: https://forum.sequencer.party/t/getting-started-with-the-fun...

AudioDevCon 2022 presentation on WAM2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfDwzaM_lTE

WAM2 api repository: https://github.com/webaudiomodules/api

Note, the easiest way to start with WAM2 is likely to look at demo plugins

https://github.com/Brotherta/wam-examples

More WAM examples: https://github.com/webaudiomodules/wam-examples

Our collection of open source WAMs: https://github.com/boourns/burns-audio-wam

If you want to use WebAudioModules in your website or web-based audio application, we also curate a package of WAMs ready to use off NPM: https://github.com/boourns/wam-community