PlaygroundMake · 10
Loop studio
Bar 1 · Beat 1
Piano
Octave C4
What's going on
How to play: pick a track, press Rec and play along with the loop using your computer keyboard or the keys on screen. The loop keeps going, so the next person picks another track and records on top. Undo removes the last take; Download saves the song as a WAV file.
Every instrument here is synthesized in your browser from simple building blocks: oscillators, noise and filters, the same ingredients as in Harmonics. No recordings are downloaded and nothing you play is uploaded.
Why it matters: in music software the hard part is timing. Notes have to land exactly on the beat even when the computer is busy with something else.
Under the hoodFor the curious · formulas and details
The loop is 4 bars of 4 beats. Positions are stored in beats, so changing the tempo keeps every note in place.
Playback uses a look-ahead scheduler: every 25 ms a timer schedules all notes due in the next 120 ms on the audio hardware's own clock, which is sample-accurate. Browser timers alone can be late by tens of milliseconds, which you would hear.
With Snap on, recorded notes are rounded to the nearest sixteenth note. The WAV export renders two passes of the loop offline, faster than real time, and writes 16-bit stereo PCM.