[mulhoon]

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?

[ginko]

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.

[JKCalhoun]

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.

[duped]

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

[TheOtherHobbes]

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.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

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.

[duped]

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.

[jmiskovic]

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]

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.

[jmiskovic]

I was talking about web as technology stack. The tech is battle proven and capable. I had great success in getting some ancient web projects to run locally, less luck with Windows projects and even less with Linux sources.

You are right that by the nature of web the long term stability is not guaranteed. The ecosystem could do more to encourage decoupling and graceful degradation. About 95% of modern web is competing in sharing your data to even more "parties with legitimate interest".

[jamesnorden]

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

[mystifyingpoi]

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?